Osbornedale State Park — Attraction in Derby

I held a memorial service for my husband right behind the large picnic shelter, overlooking the lake. My husband passed away from pancreatic cancer at the beginning of the 2020 covid epidemic, and we waited until we could feel safe to get people together. I rented the picnic shelter at Indian Wells state park months before, let people know, had folks from out of state come, and found out a day and a half before that Indian Wells was under 17 inches of water. The park manager was really on the ball, he checked the reservations for Osbournedale and discovered the people had been trying to cancel their reservation, so we could use it. The day was beautiful, after the pastor spoke, so many people got up to speak, I had several people comment on it. The picnic shelter is lovely, you have lights inside, there were about twelve picnic tables inside, and they were not packed together. It was the perfect place to create a socially distant picnic, food served in masks and gloves, with enough room...

There is an outdoor pavilion with a big stone fire place. We followed the red/yellow/red trail loop from near the pavilion, through the high and dry woods and back down through a marsh where we experienced the adventure of one of our party sinking to her thighs in the mud. It made for some dramatic moments, followed by a good laugh, but I'd advise staying away from any wet ground near the pond. If there were a void under that mud, it could have turned out much worse. There is a lot of recently disturbed ground in the park with a lot of invasive, Barberry and Winged Staff bush as well as Phragmites reeds. This is the reality of southern New England though, and just an observation. There are also some interesting rock formations along the yellow trail, not spectacular, but thought provoking as to how long they've been there and when they experienced the large fractures which you can actually see as pieces...

Pretty cool trails in a very nice forest at points. At other points you'll be wandering through a field wondering if this is really the trail and are those ticks crawling up your legs. I love rock walls and this hike had plenty of them, so there's that. The "red trail" took about 3.5 miles. We had dry, bug free conditions but I could see how it might get buggy and muddy at points. We accidentally strolled through a huge community garden next to a cemetery which was super cool (this being mid September). Many gardens were in full bloom which was an added bonus. All in all I don't know if I'll be back as there are so many places to hike and this was kind of annoying with the misleading trail markers and overgrown paths. Definitely worth trying once. I would hope they would have someone out there to do some trail maintenance soon. Oh, and we saw a snake,...