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07/05/2023 09:14 PMShoreline Greenway Trail Poised for More Growth
In 2006, college buddies Perry Rianhard and Ted Raff, along with their wives, Susan Rianhard and Ginny Raff, visited Kouchibouguac National Park on New Brunswick’s central eastern shore in an area known as the Acadian Coastal Drive in Canada. They surveyed the spectacular estuaries and beaches, saltwater lagoons, and Acadian woodlands, along with well-maintained bicycle and walking paths that linked so much of it together, providing access to people with a wide range of abilities.
And, they thought, how wonderful if there was something like this where they lived on the Connecticut shoreline. With that vision in mind, armed with their youthful enthusiasm, they came home and volunteered to help build the Shoreline Greenway Trail, already underway, a project that had morphed from a small Guilford-based group to an ambitious plan to connect people from Lighthouse Point Park in East Haven to Hammonasset Beach Park in Madison, a proposed path that would run about 25 miles.
Since then?
Well, it’s that old story of “you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find,” you get thousands of volunteers and supporters who donate time and money to keep the venture going and growing. You just might find, also detractors, some with legitimate concerns that should be addressed, making the project better, and others who sound like annoying suburban NIMFYs, the kind who spread and sow discontent. And, you just might find you end up with several, as yet unconnected, spectacular trails that have since been enjoyed hundreds of thousands of times by people from the Connecticut shoreline and from all over the world visiting here.
The Shoreline Greenway Trail’s latest success came earlier this summer when it received a $120,000 grant from the state’s Connecticut Recreational Trails fund. It will be used for design work on a proposed new section of the trail, running from the trailhead in Madison on the Boston Post Road near the entrance of Hammo, eastwards toward Madison’s Salt Meadow Park.
‘Our Favorite’
On a recent sunny day, near the proposed new section of the trail, I run into a woman from Georgia in the parking lot. Visiting family on the shoreline for the summer, she and her husband are here for about six months each year, and they visit the trail most days in the middle of the day and walk for about an hour.
They are full-time RV people who have traveled all over the lower 48 states, and she says, “coastal Connecticut in July and August, this is our favorite,” in part because of attractions like the Shoreline Greenway Trail.
“It’s so beautiful and well maintained,” she says of the trail. Her husband power walks past us, turns, and looks at his wife, tapping his watch impatiently. She says her goodbyes and hurries off to join him.
It’s so beautiful and well-maintained due to the hard work and tenacity of so many volunteers. Among them are Perry Rianhard and Ginny Raff, who have been mainstays over several decades among volunteers working on the Shoreline Greenway Trail. Both Rianhard and Raff welcome the recent grant as vital to the next phase of expansion. This phase will require both advanced design work and the realities of a permitting process that has grown ever more stringent and complicated over the years so as to protect the environment that the walkers, hikers, and bikers enjoy.
If all goes as planned, the new section of the trail will wind eastward from the existing section of the Shoreline Greenway Trail parking lot in Madison on the Boston Post Road, then just a bit south across the service road back towards the maintenance buildings, then it will dive into the woods through a mostly undeveloped part of the park, traversing wetlands and waterways until it meets Madison’s Salt Meadow Park’s playing fields. There, those walking the trail will be greeted by walking paths, hiking trails that wend through a coastal forest, an amphitheater that overlooks a river, and a kayak launch, all created from the ruins of an old airport.
Eventually, Raff says, it might be possible to extend a trail into Clinton, where some residents and officials have expressed enthusiasm for accessible trailways that connect communities and keep people safe. “I know Clinton was not originally on the list, but someone in town was interested in participating,” she says. “It’s not at this point a part of The Shoreline Greenway Trail, but it could be part of a shoreline greenway trail.”
With Respect For The Environment
Thanks to the recent grant, Shoreline Greenway Trail volunteers will be able to hire a design firm to map out the optimum path, says Raff. “There’s a lot of wetlands through there, and, you know, we need to do this with the least disruption to the environment and habitats. Then there will be surveying and wetlands permits and the like. There are some major fissures in the ground that we have to get across with some sort of bridge-like structure. So then we’ll know how much money we have to raise to do the construction.”
Rianhard offers to take me on a tour of the part where the new trail is proposed. He has a bum knee, and I’m recovering from a recent foot injury, so this time, we bow to the realities of age and injury and take a golf cart rather than hiking through, what we both would have preferred.
We bounce along the proposed path, past wildflowers, wide expanses of green grass and tangled vegetation, old abandoned dormitories used for Hammo lifeguards in the 50s and 60s, a tiny house, and a small farm where a maintenance worker used to live.
Rianhard, like Raff, notes that creating the new section of the trail will be a more complex and expensive undertaking than the original parts of the trail for a variety of reasons. Older sections of the trail, subject to rainy weather and rising water levels, require constant vigilance and maintenance. Newer parts of the trail will be built of sturdier stuff.
Also, Rianhard says, “Protecting the environment through the permitting process is more of an issue now; there is more awareness and so a more complex permitting process,” he says. “Still, this will open up a part of the park previously not open to everybody. And it will be handicapped accessible.”
He says part of the process is disturbing as little of the natural habitat as possible. “There is marsh through here,” he says, pointing. “We’re looking for the highest ground through here. And there’s a man-made pond through here.” The pond is tidal, coming in off of the Hammonasset River near Dudley Lane. “Any time you deal with a tidal body of water, the Army Corps of Engineers needs to get involved,” he says. “That is because those bodies of water are often navigable. This is not, but it is tidal.”
We travel past the backside of a small neighborhood and skirt an area of wetlands, where a raised walkway will have to be built. “The idea is to connect it to Salt Meadow Park,” he says. “That’s it, in a nutshell.”
Volunteers Needed
We talk about what’s next and the need for more volunteers to keep this initiative going for as long as it will take to finish the trail, in whatever form it will be finished. “I’ve always enjoyed the outdoors. The idea of developing trails in this property, which is quite a beautiful place, was quite appealing,” he says. “Ginny (Raff) was always involved. She got me interested. Her husband and I went to college together. But we’re not getting any younger.”
Rianhard and other older volunteers did some of the original construction and maintenance themselves, something that, for people like us, becomes less feasible as well-worn knees, feet, shoulders, and the like call out for attention, reconstruction, and recovery. “Before my knee went out, I was over here working on it every day,” he says. “And I hope to do that again.”
We talk about the future of the trail and the original plan to have it go all the way from Madison to New Haven. “That won’t happen in my lifetime,” he says.
We finish our tour, ending up back in the parking lot on the Boston Post Road. “But anything that gets bikers off the road is safer. And if you can combine safety with beautiful surroundings, all the better,” he says. “That was the original idea, to build something that would take people off the roads. We’ve been lucky here; the landowner is the state. Other areas of development go across private property…and so there will be people who fight it.”
That is to be expected. Fair enough. And reasoned debate with reasonable people brings with it ideas about how to improve a plan. To my great annoyance and puzzlement, however, there are also people worried that trails past their private property will bring in “riff-raff from the park,” as some have expressed it. Rianhard has heard people express similar concerns, including people who live in our hometown of Madison and nearby Guilford. Still, Rianhard adds, some of those who were originally concerned “now see the advantages of it, and it’s very gratifying. They see it’s a good thing to be within walking distance of a greenway trail. They’re the people using the trail.”
Rianhard has seen some people, who originally were concerned about the trail being nearby their homes, turn into wholehearted supporters, now greeting volunteers with donuts and coffee. “And they’re wonderful people,” he says. “Success leads to success. When people see how it works out, it becomes a positive.”
Rianhard heads out, and I head back to my car. I see a young woman driving in. I stop to chat, and she says her name is Amy; she’s from Madison. She, too, loves the Shoreline Greenway Trail.
“We try to come down here three times a week,” she says. “I love it. It’s just gorgeous. I love the view; I love the smells. We are so fortunate to have this nearby.”
We talk about how that is due in part to the work of so many volunteers, some of whom are growing older. She mentions her husband loves to work outdoors and that one of his favorite things is to mow the lawn. She says she might ask him if he might want to volunteer.
Amy, if you and your husband do want to, or if anyone else wants to, here’s how you can find out more: www.shorelinegreenwaytrail.org/volunteers. For those who would like to donate, here is more information about that: www.shorelinegreenwaytrail.org/donate.
Editor’s Note: This article was changed on July 5, 2023 to correct the direction in which the trail will be extended. It will be extended eastward, not westward.