Sky’s The Limit # 3: Silver Sands State Park

Prologue: A hiking challenge is going on this year by the Department of State Parks in the state of Connecticut where I live. They are calling it “Sky’s The Limit”. We have to finish a hike in the chosen 20 Park and Forest locations before December 3rd this year Each location has some specific points of interest that the departments asks us to take pictures of and document them. Most of the Parks and Forests are located in an hours of driving distance, except a few. I decided to take this challenge and hopefully will be able to complete all of them. Here we go!

Next up is Silver Sands State Park. This is #3 on the list provided by DEEP. I am not following the order they have listed. I am just going to any hike I can whenever I can from that list. 🙂

Silver Sands State Park is the area around the Silver Sands Beach in Milford along Long Island Sound. It’s a beautiful sandy beach filled with sea shells. The hike around the beach is approx a 2 miles one-way boardwalk that begins at Silver Sands and reaches up to Walnut Beach, the next beach in Milford. It was a pretty easy hike, and along the way I managed to capture the two photo points that the Sky’s The Limit challenge warranted as well.

One special thing about Silver Sands Beach is the sand bar that goes up to Charles Island. This 1.25 miles round trip sand bar is seen only when the tide is low and connects Charles Island with Silver Sands Beach. I know a few friends who have tried to be there at the right time to go across the sand bar. However they always missed the tide.

Lucky for us, we were just in time for the tide to go down and the sand bar open up. It was fun to walk across the sea-shell filled rocky sand bar to the Charles Island. We were also lucky that the Island was closed to public till recently due to it being converted to a Natural Area Preserve for Nesting Birds such as Heron and Egrets. Since the nesting period ended, the park ranger allowed us to go on to the island and around it.

The Island also came with a path around it that we could hike; and again the path was filled completely with seashells. I wondered why the beach was filled with sea-shells and so was the island and asked the Park Ranger. She mentioned that all the sea shells have been carried on to the shore by the waves. However it was hard for me to buy that since the sea-shells around the Charles Island at least seemed to have been placed strategically.

Anyways, it was a fun walk on the sand bar and around the island. The low tide stayed for only a couple hours so we had to rush back before we got stuck on the Island. Check out the land closing off as the tide rose in the pic below.

Other sights we caught along the way: As we reached Walnut Beach on the boardwalk, we saw a Kindness Rocks Project; a band of Pigeons lounging on the shore; One pier dedicated to Albert L. “Bert” Monroe Sr. along with prayer or wish strips of cloth tied to the fence nearby; beginnings of making the pier a lover’s lock pier; and a blue carpet (made of some material) on one of the entrances to Walnut beach leading to the beach.