Brookfield Hiker's Guide: Birch Rocks, Red Trail

My colleague Amy has already written up Birch Rocks' Yellow Trail... but that's not the full story at this preserve, because I can't think of another local hike where two trails can be so close together, and yet so different. The Yellow Trail is airy, easy, predictable; the Red Trail is darker, wetter, rockier, more rugged... even though, most of the time, it's within a stone's throw of the Yellow, just on the other side of Fern Brook.

You can't get to the Red Trail without hiking in on the Yellow, which starts on Obtuse Road North — take a left off 133 a couple hundred yards past Fernbrook Drive (if you see Bridgewater, you've gone too far), proceed downhill half a mile, and pull into the deep-but-inconspicuous, seldom-used parking area just past the bottom of the hill. Continue on foot going west, up the hill, and within a hundred feet, after a driveway, you'll see the trail entrance and the Birch Rocks signboard. It's about a half-mile, all downhill, until you branch off at the Red Trail, going left. Just before the intersection, you may spot a patch of green moss... and if you're lucky, growing in the moss some chantarelle mushrooms, rarely big enough to warrant picking.

Like the Yellow, this trail is maintained by Brookfield Open Space Legacy, and is mostly downhill right to the water. But while the Yellow makes for a leisurely walk, this one goes in-and-out among hemlocks and birches, over and around and through stone walls, into and out of marshy areas and fern groves. In places it feels almost prehistoric... though you'll flush flocks of turkeys rather than velociraptors, and hear titmice rather than T. Rexes. My dog Delilah encountered her first groundhog here, and practically snapped the leash trying to chase it.

What makes this trail special, though, is its proximity to Fern Brook — much of the year you're accompanied by the gurgling of falling water, can see the play of light on a dozen pools and miniature waterfalls (the brook is full of rocks and boulders). I prefer going up Red to going down it, because climbing forces you to look around more, pay closer attention... and that's when you realize how beautiful the stream is. At the bottom, where Fern Brook debouches into a small Lake Lillinonah bay (the stream is born, if Google Maps doesn't lie, near the intersection of Tower and Cross roads), you'll find all kinds of wrack and ruin — tennis balls, bleach bottles, dock flotation foam, old buoys — but turn and look upstream, and you could be in the Adirondacks.

The trees on the Red Trail are mostly coniferous, so you'll miss the transition — the "ecotone," my son tells me — from deciduous to coniferous that the Yellow Trail provides. But you'll gain a nice, short walk along the lake: go left at the water — north — and in a few hundred yards you'll reach Lookout Rock, a huge boulder that's a good (if not particularly comfortable) place to picnic. In the spring and early summer, drop twigs in the water and watch as four- to six-inch fish — pumpkinseed sunfish, I think — investigate, in hopes of finding an insect. And in the winter, start a rock-throwing contest with the kids — first one to hit the big stick you've throw out, wins!