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| Hiking | 4.84 Miles |
990 AEG |
| | Hiking | 4.84 Miles | 3 Hrs 47 Mns | | 1.74 mph |
| 990 ft AEG | 1 Hour Break | 10 LBS Pack | | |
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| no partners | | In August of 2025, I organized a Meshomasic Hiking Club trip on the Mattabesett Trail, a portion of the New England Trail (NET) Connecticut Section 12 in Middlefield and Middletown, Connecticut. Our party ranged in ages from 3 to 68, although the youngest was in a backpack. We met at Route 66 and 147 and then shuttled a couple of cars to the Wesleyan Woods trailhead on Country Club Road where we started the hike. Although I was the nominal leader of this trip, as it turned out, most of the other adults in the party had hiked this trail before.
This section of the blue-blazed NET starts out on an old road, before evolving into singletrack among tall grass. Our seven-year-old did a great job of spotting the blazes as we climbed up toward the summit of Higby Mountain. Just a little short of the summit, we took a cross-country detour to an overhanging rock, almost a cave, where the “Old Leatherman” would spend nights as he made his 365 mile loop every 34 days in the 1880s.
Upon leaving the cave, we kicked up a nest of ground bees that stung a couple people. In our haste to leave the bees, our track wavered a bit as we aimed for the coordinates of an old plane crash. While I thought this was the crash of a Cessna 172 from 1966, it turned out that this was the remains of a twin-engine Beechcraft 18 that crashed in 1954.
Following the visit to the wreck, we headed to the top of the mountain, back to the blue-blazed trail, and enjoyed the rest of our hike at a leisurely pace. The hike finished up at a small restaurant near where we parked the cars that has a walkup window selling ice cream, which several of us enjoyed. |
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