This is my second county completed, I finished up Windham County in the Fall of 2022. Windham is my home county and where I cut my teeth on this site. Where there were trails I’d never known existed right in my backyard and hidden spots on trails I’d hiked many times before. It felt like a big deal to complete a county by hiking the vast majority of the trails, filling out the map, and having a sense of the depth of the area.
Oddly the completion of Tolland County has had a very different feel. I was already at 82% complete at the beginning of the year and I only had about 30 places left to explore. It was a cleanup job, hitting the odd Hockanum River Trail locations, the short land trust trails, confirming locations really didn’t have trails yet, hiking farm fields and forgotten trails. Sure there were gems like Nipmuck Woods among the final few but the actual completion actually felt pretty lackluster.
But, then I took a look at the list.
Tolland County is 13 towns encompassing 417 square miles. This surprisingly makes it the smallest county in the state and has the second fewest explorable areas at 154 (29 more than Windham County) of the eight.
However, it preserves well over 21,000 acres nearing 10% of its total area. It has 3 of the most trailed towns in the state in Mansfield, Tolland, and Union. It has two of the most popular state parks in the state at Mansfield Hollow and Bigelow Hollow and two terminuses for blue blaze trails.
There are 154 hiking areas with 363 miles of trails in the county, 31 boating/fishing spots, 5 mountain bike areas, 4 waterfalls, 10 overlooks, 3 towers, 1 cave, 6 disc golf courses, 2 bouldering areas, and 1 backpack/camping area (at this snapshot in time). There are a handful of handicap accessible trails, trails geared toward seniors, rugged summit climbs, scenic laurel beauty, dense mountain bike networks, musical trails, storybook trails, islands to paddle around, and some surprising history intermixed.
For me the biggest challenge is interpreting it for you and where it still feels there’s much work to be done. There is a County page with some highlights and lists and I laboriously cobble together town pages that are about half as good as I’d like them to be. But envision more photos, more recommendations, more itineraries, more interesting ways of looking at what you want to see. Always a work in progress.
For now, Tolland County is complete, right up until I hit publish. Then it’s time to make it better and more complete 😉