Want to thru-hike across Rhode Island? Here's the trail to follow
On a spring morning in 1993, state officials and hikers gathered to dedicate a new trail linking Dawley Park in Exeter with Stepstone Falls in West Greenwich.
The opening of the 7-mile trail through the Arcadia Management Area would have seemed like a modest achievement in and of itself, but it marked the beginning of something much larger.
It was the first piece of the North-South Trail, a walking route that runs the entire length of Rhode Island, from Charlestown’s sandy beaches to Burrillville’s dense forests.
In the nearly three decades since its completion, the trail has become beloved by outdoor enthusiasts for the varied scenery along its 78-mile path and its standing as the only way to thru-hike Rhode Island.
John Kostrzewa takes in the water view on a 2021 hike at Stepstone Falls, located in West Greenwich within Arcadia Management Area.
“It’s one of the best things that Rhode Island offers,” said John Kostrzewa, a hiking columnist for The Journal and author of the guidebook “Walking Rhode Island: 40 Hikes for Nature and History Lovers.”
North-South Trail was completed in 1999
In the early 1970s, George Ernst, an avid hiker who lived in Cranston, dreamed up the idea for a long trail that traversed the state.
He believed it could be achieved by connecting the many state and federal lands that already existed along the Connecticut border, from the Buck Hill Management Area near the Massachusetts state line to the George Washington and Arcadia management areas to the Yawgoog Scout Camp to Burlingame State Park and on to Ninigret National Wildlife Refuge on Rhode Island’s southern shoreline.
But doing so would require purchasing more properties to fill in the gaps, and the proposal soon fell by the wayside.
The state Department of Environmental Management revived the plan in 1991, due in no small part to the energy of senior planner Ginny Leslie. With the support of the National Park Service, the nine communities along the route and many volunteers, the state agency moved forward to make Ernst’s vision a reality.
In June 1992, about 120 people took part in an inaugural trek to help map out the twists and turns of the trail and drum up support for the proposal. They would continue to get together annually to hike the trail for many years afterward.
Within less than a year of that first walk, they'd cleared the way for the first leg of the trail through Arcadia to open. And by 1999, the entire trail, blazed with blue markings, was complete.
Ernst, who died in 2002 at the age of 91, saw the trail as a way of showcasing the varied natural beauty of western Rhode Island, which he considered among the most scenic areas he’d ever seen.
"My concept was to make a wilderness path all the way through Rhode Island," he once told The Journal.
Woods, ponds and waterfalls in western Rhode Island
Kostrzewa hiked the North-South Trail in stages in the summer of 2017, shortly after he retired from his full-time job as an assistant managing editor at The Journal.
He said it was a perfect way of refocusing and setting himself up for the next part of his life as a hiking writer. His Facebook posts on the trail were the start of what would become his Walking Rhode Island columns.
Kostrzewa, a Cranston resident, said that walking the trail offered him a chance to explore a part of the state that was unfamiliar.
“It was a great experience to try and understand these places,” he said. “The history, the vegetation, the wildlife. All that was different.”
He especially loved the deep forests in northwest Burrillville that feel a world apart from the densely developed central part of Rhode Island.
Other hikers have their own favorite places on the trail. Jim Robinson, a Cranston resident who's hiked New England's tallest peaks, has done the trail at least three times. He counts as a favorite the area around Browning Mill Pond in Exeter, where he's seen herons and bald eagles, and says he loves nearly all of the trail.
Stepstone Falls is just off the blue-blazed North/South Trail.
"It is not only a treasure for me, it is for so many others," he wrote. "Sometimes I get to share it with others while other times I can spend a great deal of time away from the crowd in areas they may never visit."
Jeff Walker, a hiker and trail runner who created the maps for Kostrzewa’s book, has traversed all of the trail except for a stretch near Coventry where hikers must switch to paved roads.
He pointed to Stepstone Falls in Arcadia as one treasured place. There, the Falls River cascades over granite shelves before becoming the Wood River and journeying on to the Atlantic Ocean.
“Just a tranquil place and nice spot to cool off,” Walker said.
Craig Berke, a retired Journal editor who did parts of the trail in 2017 with Kostrzewa, also mentioned Stepstone Falls, as well as another small cascade on the Moosup River in Foster. Like Kostrzewa, he was struck by the rural character of western Rhode Island that was such a contrast to suburban parts of the state.
The difference stood out, especially on a drive with his son to Buck Hill, where the northern terminus of the trail is located.
“The backroads trip through Burrillville prompted my son to ask if we were still in Rhode Island,” Berke said.
