Hiking a Natural Haven: Paumanok Path Celebrates 25 Years

When Rick Whalen moved to East Hampton in the late 1970s, he thought of it as a beach town.

Then he took his first walk through the forest.

There, he discovered a different side to his new home, the former deputy town attorney recalled during a recent interview.

By 1981, he had mapped all of the trails in Northwest Woods. He became a founding member of the East Hampton Trails Preservation Society and, with a dedicated band of volunteers — as well as cooperation from Suffolk County, New York State, private homeowners, the Peconic Land Trust and other entities — created the Paumanok Path.

Sprawling across 45 miles, the East Hampton segment of the total trail — which spans 125 miles starting in Rocky Point — rambles through the heart of the white pine and shrub forests to wetlands and bluffs, crossing footbridges and boardwalks, passing historic sites and cemeteries from the northern corner of Wainscott to Montauk Point.

“It’s very diverse,” Whalen said. “It really is the tour de force of East Hampton.”

Through mid-November, the East Hampton Trails Preservation Society is celebrating the Paumanok Path’s 25th anniversary with a series of weekend hikes, which began last Saturday, that will break the entire length of the trail into consecutive, more digestible sections for novice and avid hikers alike.

By the end, they will have replicated the inaugural hike of the Paumanok Path that Whalen and others — including Tom Ruhle, a former Planning Board member and town housing director — completed 25 years ago.

“It now has become the spine that connects a lot of our open spaces together into a unified backbone of the community,” Ruhle said. “The other half of the equation is that nobody thinks about it when they think about the Hamptons.”

In the history of the East End, the Paumanok Path is relatively young. Its story dates back to the early 1990s, Whalen recalled, when he received a phone call from his friend Ray Corwin, who served as the first executive director of the Central Pine Barrens Joint Planning and Policy Commission, and as vice president of the Long Island Greenbelt Trail Conference. He had a proposition.

He wanted to extend the Pine Barrens Trail, which ran east from Rocky Point to, roughly, the Shinnecock Canal, all the way to the Montauk Point Lighthouse, Whalen explained.

“I said, ‘I think it’s impossible,’” he recalled.

But, to humor him, Whalen began to look at the map of the already established trail system in East Hampton Town, he said, and while there were still many gaps, it somehow seemed possible. In 1993, at Southampton Town Hall, the first organizational meeting was held — and they named the future trail “Paumanok Path.”

“We gradually began to realize, or believe, that we had enough to make it work, that we could find enough linkages to make it work without a lot of road walking,” Whalen said. “Because if you’re doing a lot of road walking, well, then, there’s not really a trail.”

While the Paumanok Path today has benefited from the Community Preservation Fund, its original construction predated the program and relied on cooperation from multiple municipalities and nonprofit environmental organizations, which came more easily than Whalen expected, he said.

When subdivisions would come in front of the East Hampton Town Planning Board, for example, the attorney would request a reserved area for a trail — and they were, more often than not, granted.

“Things kind of fell into place,” he said.

One of the biggest hurdles was closing a critical hole through the white pine forest just before Old Northwest Road, which fell on 45 acres of private land owned by Marillyn B. Wilson — who just so happened to be a prominent conservationist and philanthropist.

“I laid it out for her,” Whalen recalled. “I said, ‘We’d like to put a connecting trail through your property’ — by the way, it’s within sight of her house — ‘for half a mile or so.’ And she agreed.”

With access to the land, called Wilson’s Grove Preserve — which, in 2008, she donated to the Peconic Land Trust as a public trail portion of the Paumanok Path — construction began in earnest. It drew the curiosity of local media and residents, including Michael Patrick — now a general director of the East Hampton Trails Preservation Society — who started paying attention to the news coverage.

“Any organization that can pull that many different constituencies together,” he said, “get the support of the town, the county, the state, and really make hiking the priority with all this beautiful, preserved land, I said, ‘That’s gotta be pretty good organization.’”

Over the course of thousands of hours, crews of volunteers took to the woods and the wetlands, clearing the understory, building bridges and cutting trails with hand tools — nary a mechanical weed whacker in sight, Whalen said. The work could be grueling and, sometimes, still is, Ruhle said, depending on the overgrowth.

“There are so many people who contributed so much of their life to the last 25 years, and many of them are not with us,” Ruhle said. “But their legacy lives on in that trail.”

In conjunction with East Hampton Town’s 350th anniversary, the Paumanok Path officially debuted in 1998 with two back-to-back weekends of hikes that covered the full 45 miles — resulting in long, 12-mile days.

“When we were originally going to duplicate what we had previously done, everyone’s like, ‘No, no, no, we’re not going 12 miles again,’” Ruhle, now 65, said with a laugh. “The whole society’s a little bit older than it was back then.”

Having missed the final stretch through Hither Woods 25 years ago — he had hockey tickets that he refused to give up — Ruhle will lead a redemption hike on November 4 through “arguably, the trails I know best,” he said.

The festivities will culminate two weekends later, on November 18, during a hike from Third House to Montauk Lighthouse — either 3.5 or 7 miles, depending on the route — with a closing ceremony to mark the occasion.

“It’s a big deal for us and the hope is that we can attract a lot of interest,” Patrick said, “because it will not only be for people to enjoy themselves hiking, but it will be also for the recognition of the importance of the trails and the importance of preservation generally.”

Trail cutting and maintenance only continue in East Hampton Town, building on the network of spaces to convene with nature, which is what drew President Irwin Levy to the organization years ago. There, in the woods, he too feels connection — as well as a celebration of who and what the East Hampton community is.

“With the development pressure and everything else we have out here, the trails in a sense are sort of a haven for us all,” he said, “a reminder of a place where we can catch our breath and it’s just not paved over, so I’m grateful for that.”