Sleeping Giant (Connecticut)

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The Sleeping Giant, or Mount Carmel, is a trap rock ridge system located in the Mount Carmel neighborhood of Hamden, Connecticut, overlooking Quinnipiac University. It is approximately ten miles north of downtown New Haven.

View from the "chin" of the Giant

It is best known for anthropomorphically representing a slumbering human figure, and the ridge's profile features distinct "head", "chin", and "chest" sections. Local Native American tribes considered the mountain to be the resting physical form of a destructive spirit. In their eschatology, it was presaged that Sleeping Giant would arise again one day to wreak destruction.

The hill is the focus of Sleeping Giant State Park, which features

1500 acres (6 km²) of forest and rock outcrops,
a dozen principal hiking trails in a 30 mile system,
continuation of its Blue Trail beyond the park on the 23 mile Quinnipiac Trail, with connection to the 7-mile Regicides Trail,
additional cross-country skiing and equestrian trails,
a picnic area with picnic tables, small fireplaces, a roofed pavilion, flush toilets (except in winter) and two composting toilets (year-round) and
popular trout-fishing areas along the Mill River.

(Camping by the public is no longer permitted, and the former camping facilities adjacent to the picnic area are well along in returning to open forest.)

Lookout tower at the summit of the Giant as seen in October 2004.

A castle-like four-story stone lookout tower (built by the WPA) stands at the summit on the Giant's chest. It is reached by a 1.6-mile graded dirt road (closed to vehicles) with its 600 or so feet of elevation gain distributed nearly uniformly over that length, at undemanding grades. Its top, at approximately 750 feet above sea level, offers long views of much of New Haven and some of Hartford Counties, over more than 270 degrees of the compass, and (atmospheric conditions permitting) across the Sound to the Shoreham area on Long Island.

Without extravagant exaggeration, Sleeping Giant enthusiasts describe the trails as offering all of the terrain types found elsewhere in New England—"but not very much of each". (For instance, the legendary mile-long (1.5 km) boulder-jumble of the Maine border's Mahoosuc Notch is echoed on the Giant by about a ten-foot (three meter) stretch.)

The picnic and parking areas at the main entrance, in the southwest corner of the state park, the Tower Path, and the Tower structure, are maintained primarily or exclusively by state employees of the Department of Environmental Protection and volunteers.

In addition, a private volunteer organization, the Sleeping Giant Park Association (SGPA), conducts routine maintenance of all the hiking trails except the Tower Path, including clearing trails of the results of storm damage to trees and regularly rejuvenating the painted blazes delineating the courses of trails. In the 1920s activists sought an end to the trap rock quarrying operation on west side of the Head of the Giant, through assertion of deed restrictions. These efforts were unproductive, at least in part because of the prospect that enforcement would lead to quarrying of the much less exploited east side, which was free of those limits. The economic dislocations of the early 1930s included reduced demand for trap rock, which rendered the quarrying unprofitable and eventually permitted the group to afford purchasing back the mining rights and thus to ensure that the quarrying could not resume. This and the rest of the land of the present state park were acquired and donated to the state under perpetual restrictions. The SGPA is the oldest volunteer group for Connecticut state parks, and continues to acquire land. Through its efforts and those of other volunteer groups, Sleeping Giant has more volunteer support than any other Connecticut park.