Take a Hike!

Story by James T. Cain | Photo by John Groo

The brown leaves have begun to crackle underfoot, but the still pliant yellow ellipses of sweet birch bend like fine carpet on the moist earth. The chattering hikers, in a long snaking line of staffs and backpacks, climb quickly through the kaleidoscopic forest, with its reds, yellows, and oranges. The trick is to keep up with Len Berton.

Berton is 68 years young, a strong hiker and the leader of this group. On a crisp Thursday morning in October, almost 20 hikers are tackling a circular 5-mile route along the Tunxis trail in Burlington, to the top of Taine Mountain to Perry’s Lookout, and back again to the parking area. It’s an arduous climb, but you wouldn’t know it from the spritely conversation among the trekkers.

Berton leads several hiking groups, but this one is assembled through Farmington’s continuing education program. What exactly is taught?

“Hiking!” Berton says. “Not falling off steep places.”
He’s joking – mostly.

It’s autumn. Time for a drive past nature’s colorful change of uniform, stopping for cider, admiring the soaring steeples of Connecticut’s many Congregational churches, and pricing antiques before you buy pumpkins. But off the beaten path, Robert Frost’s “road not taken,” an autumn hike through the quiet, changing woods is as exhilarating as your lungs (and legs) can bear.

The hikes Berton organizes are for intermediate to advanced hikers, capable of some steep climbs and even some climbing on rocks, using hand-holds. It’s no walk in the park, and injuries can happen. But for these hikers, the group effort, the commune with nature, the air in their lungs, and the payoff at the pinnacle are worth the day-after sore muscles and scrapes.

“You get up on a high place with an overlook and you just see a sea of color out there. It’s gorgeous,” Berton says. “That’s when I say, ‘We’re lucky to live here.’ ”

The continuing education class is held in two seasons: fall and spring, but the core group and Berton hike year-round, with the Appalachian Mountain Club, the Sierra Club and the Sleeping Giant Park Association, or as the spirit moves them. Berton maintains a website, www.cthikes.com, that lists all these and “unofficial” journeys in and around the Litchfield Hills.

“We do snowshoeing in the winter. We sweat a lot in the summer,” Berton says. “Some of the hikes are pretty strenuous and challenging. I don’t want to take along people who think we’re going to take a little stroll along the river.” These are folks who are serious about getting into the woods and walking. “And maybe weigh about three pounds less when they get home,” Berton says.

The number of hikers in the Farmington class has stayed pretty steady over the years at 25 people, though not everyone can show up every week. It meets every Thursday morning in season, with hikes running from about 9 a.m. to noon. “The average number of actual hikers is 15 to 18, sometimes as many as 20. Toward the end of the season, people get busy with their kids, and I think it’s been as low as eight,” Berton says.

The hikes are usually in the approximate vicinity of Farmington and Burlington and usually not more than an hour’s drive away. That’s hard to do and stay in Connecticut, anyway. The group has taken a less rigorous tour around Burr Pond in Torrington, and walked a long trail or two in People’s Forest in Barkhamsted.

“The group ranges in age from people in their 40s up into their 70s. Since we meet on Thursdays, it does limit it to people who aren’t working full-time,” Berton says.

After retiring from a long career in computers and telecommunications, Berton began leading the class three years ago, taking the reins from Marie Coons, who did it for ten years. She’s still hiking.

“When I first joined Marie’s group, I was the only man,” Berton says. “That took a little getting used to, so I felt a little uncomfortable at first and some of these women became good friends. My wife called them my ‘harem,’ ‘But go get some exercise,’ she said.”

Recently though, the group has become divided evenly in gender, with more men signing up. One of them is Gene Chamberlain.

Chamberlain, 64, recently moved to Farmington from the Chicago area and has been a member for the last two seasons. “I was looking for an activity and was paging through the continuing ed book when I saw this,” he says.

Chamberlain is retirement age, but has two younger children in high school. Both he and his wife, Karen, have worked in the insurance business and the family moved to Connecticut for her job. Chamberlain works with charitable organizations now, but a principal duty these days is taking care of his high-school age son and daughter. So he has Thursday mornings off generally.

“It’s wonderful. For me, it was a marvelous opportunity to learn about this area, because I had relocated from Illinois. On top of that, the group’s a lot of fun. Most of the hiking experience relates around the people in the group. When you’re hiking, you kind of rotate around, so that you’re with a few different people in the course of a hike. You chit-chat and see some pretty scenery, and Len does a great job. There’s a number of physical benefits and there are social benefits. I intend to continue doing it indefinitely,” Chamberlain says. “There are certainly some forest preserve areas in Illinois, but nothing like out East here.”

The hikes get progressively cooler so the hikers experience the full growth of the season and nature’s gradual progress into hibernation. In the spring, of course, the group watches the woods wake up again.

“What still amazes me is that you’ll be hiking in dense forest, and you’ll come across a stone fence,” Chamberlain says. “The first time, I had to ask Len, ‘What is that? What is a stone fence doing out here in the forest?’ I don’t know whether Len answered me or someone else, but the answer is that it wasn’t always forest, it used to be farmland.”

Cheryl Janer, 54, of Canton, works as an office assistant for an antiques and fine arts appraiser in Unionville. “I joined the AMC in the early ’90s, and I hike with them maybe twice a year, but their hikes are pretty far away. When the continuing ed group came up, I jumped at that because it’s local,” she says.

“When I first started with the group, I found the hikes a little difficult, but I’m used to it now,” Janer says.

When Daniel Boone blazed a trail through the Cumberland Gap, he notched trees with his hand ax. Today, blazes, which point a trail’s path, are painted on tree trunks. The widest network of trails in the state is marked by a light blue color.

Connecticut’s Blue-Blazed Hiking Trail system consists of more than 800 miles of trails; if you add state parks, Berton estimates there are 900 to 1,000 miles of marked trails in this little state. “I’ve read that the only New England state that has more trails than Connecticut is New Hampshire, more than Maine, more than Massachusetts, more than Vermont. We’re lucky to be here.”

All the Blue-Blazed trails are in The Connecticut Walk Book, put out by the Connecticut Forest and Park Association. Volunteers do all the work maintaining the trails.

In spring, Janer likes that hikers encounter waterfalls and roaring creeks, which have to be negotiated. In the Sessions Woods wildlife area in Burlington, Chamberlain says, there are active beaver dams, and a fire tower that has a plywood cutout of all the peaks visible in the distance. “You can see what ridge you’re looking at or what town,” he says. “It’s impressive.”

“We have a couple members of the group who know a lot about plants and point them out to those of us who don’t know as much. I find that very enjoyable,” Janer says. “We have a lot of fun. We talk – a lot.”

Chamberlain says sometimes the talking distracts from the business at hand. “Unfortunately, some of us are so busy talking we’re not really looking at the painted signs on trees. Fortunately, Len is there to do that,” Chamberlain says. He laughs, “Or we’d probably get lost. But the trails are all very well marked.”

Has Berton ever gotten lost?

“Often,” he smiles. “If I get off the trail, what I usually do is have the group fan out and look for the blazes. But I do have a GPS, and I always set that to where the cars are, so if all else fails I’m not going to get so lost I can’t find my way out.”

James T. Cain is a Connecticut-based journalist and freelance writer. His book One-on-One Baseball with Dom Scala will be published in January.