Date visited: 4/5/2021

This place is an old closed down psychiatric hospital. Some of the buildings on campus have been converted to local municipal offices, while others remain abandoned. The whole place sounded a lot more interesting than it actually was. The trail was mostly a high traffic paved walking path, but there are standard wooded trails at the rear of the property as well.

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Date visited: 3/4/2022

It was "Employee Appreciation Day," and everyone in our department was given the afternoon off! So I packed my dogs up and headed to this place....I wish I hadn't. We started on the Housatonic Rail Trail in Monroe and worked our way through the mud to the Newtown town line. The wide, muddy trail in Monroe was built on the old rail bed, but after it crosses into Newtown, the trail is more of a standard woodland trail built along side the tracks. It ends near ruins of an old factory. The whole trail was blah, and the mud didn't help. There wasn't anything real scenic about it, at least this time of year.

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Date visited: 4/6/2023

I followed the All-Trails route that is called "Deep Brook Preserve: Al's Trail". I don't know who Al is, or why there is a trail named after him, or even how much of the route was actually "Al's Trail". I know the section through the woods at the end was called "Trail Of Angels". The route also led us through the Catherine Violet Hubbard Animal Sanctuary. Scroll down the page a bit to read about that section. The whole loop was about three quarters open field mowed areas, and about one quarter through the woods. It was overcast and misting when we started the hike, but it was hot and sunny by the time we finished. With the lack of shade, it was probably a good thing it was cloudy for much of the hike, as it kept it a bit cooler. When the sun came out at the end, it was the hottest it's been this year. This isn't a bad hike, but would probably be nicer in a month or so when the leaves are green.

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Date visited: 4/6/2023

We passed through this animal sanctuary named after one of the Sandy Hook victims as part of our Deep Brook Preserve hike. This was actually the nicest part of the hike. The sanctuary is open to the public, but is still in the building phase. We did not see any animals in the sanctuary, other than people walking their dogs. We actually passed through here twice. It was still overcast and dreary the first time, so I came back at the end to re-take the pictures when the sun was out.

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Date visited: 4/6/2023

This is the Town of Newton's Dog Park. This is one of the nicer dog parks we've visited. It's adjacent to the Deep Brook Preserve, so we checked out the park after our hike. Even after the 3 1/2 mile hike on a hot day, Lexi still got a case of the zoomies!

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