New Bridge Provides A Newtown Link To Huntington Park

By Steve Bigham

Newtown residents seeking to access Collis P. Huntington State Park will have an easier time of it now that a new footbridge has been constructed over a stream along Hopewell Road. The project, headed by Newtown resident Al Goodrich, was completed two weeks ago.

“We wanted an entrance for Newtown and this bridge gives us that,” said Mr Goodrich, pointing out that people had to walk across rocks in the stream prior to the bridge’s construction.

  Scenic Huntington State Park is located mostly in Redding. To get to the main entrance requires a trip to Redding. However, Newtown hikers may now use the 24-foot bridge to access the blue trail, which traverses the entire park. The bridge is actually located beyond the Newtown border on state property within Redding.

Mr Goodrich included the Huntington State Park in the first edition of the Newtown Trails Book back in 1991. And, thanks largely to Mr Goodrich’s effort, it has become a popular weekend destination for Newtowners, who park their cars along Dodgingtown Road, close to the park’s entrance. 

But a “genuine access point” to the park has been advocated by both Mr Goodrich and fellow Trail Book publisher Mary Mitchell for more than a decade. That became a reality last year when the town received $15,000 from the Iroquois Gas Transmission Company to build a footbridge across a river that runs parallel to some of Hopewell Road.

 “This will make a world of difference,” Mr Goodrich concluded. “I hope Redding sees fit to get a couple of parking lots on their side.”

Last week, First Selectman Herb Rosenthal met with Redding first selectman Natalie Ketchum to discuss the creation of a parking lot using both Newtown and Redding right-of-way land. Using Iroquois funds, Mr Rosenthal proposed to pave an area within Redding. Mrs Ketchum was receptive to the idea, according to Mr Rosenthal.

For over ten years now, Mr Goodrich, 80, has been a chronicler of Newtown’s open space, walking nearly every inch of it while recording his progress and creating an extensive network of trails and trail maps to go with them. He has unlocked the daunting Lower Paugussett State Forest, plotted the ridges of Rocky Glen State Park, and designed an intricate trail system for Huntington State Park. It is this last feat that has been recently noticed by Connecticut’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP).

Last year, Mr Goodrich was recognized by the DEP with the GreenCircle Environmental Award for dedicating several hundred hours to mapping and color-coding hiking trails at Huntington State Park.

“I had lived [in Newtown] 20 years before discovering Huntington,” Mr Goodrich said last year.

Back in 1988, Al Goodrich, a retired mechanical engineer and then-director of the Newtown Forest Association, began walking the 23 open space properties that the association possessed at the time. “I thought that I needed to get to know the properties in Newtown,” he remembers. “After I saw every one of them, I wanted to show them to people.”

It was then that he and Mrs Mitchell began creating the Newtown Trails Book. Needing a sixth map to render the book complete, Mr Goodrich turned to Huntington State Park. Though most of the wilderness rests in Redding, they justified putting it in the Newtown Trails Book based on a small Newtown entrance into the park.

The Newtown Trails Book is now in its fifth edition, and Mr Goodrich has measured over 10 miles of hiking trails in Huntington that meander over 828 acres and around wetlands, lagoons, and lakes. What remained was to devise a way of marking these trails with discernable symbols that would not only differentiate them but also enhance the usefulness of the trail guide.

Mr Goodrich’s sons, Gary and David, along with park superintendent Andy Sullivan, volunteered their time to build the bridge.