Getting outside to play: HVRHS assistant principal treks up Barrack Mountain

“It’s a gorgeous day, why don’t you go outside and play?” was one of my mother’s practiced exhortations whenever she found my brother and I staring saucer-eyed at the television set on a Saturday morning. After a dozen or so repetitions on her part, we would manage to break free from Bugs Bunny’s stranglehold on our brains and stagger into the sunlight like a pair of prepubescent zombies.However, somewhere between threshing our backyard with Wiffle Ball bats and nearly setting Mohawk Forest ablaze during a Boy Scout outing, I acquired a taste for nature that drew me to this rural section of Connecticut, where the Housatonic cuts a winding path, and the lower Berkshires shoot dramatically skyward from hayfields. My mother rests well, knowing that her nagging eventually drove me to accept a position as the assistant principal at Housatonic Valley Regional High School — the one public high school that is situated directly on the Appalachian Trail (AT).From the school parking lot, three routes branch out into Falls Village: head north toward Katahdin, head south toward Springer Mountain, or head roughly east and roughly vertically over Barrack Mountain. All of these routes share the same AT lineage, though the route over Barrack lost its official designation a few years back and became a part of the Mohawk Trail network. There are some excellent hikes along the Mohawk Trail, but less use and funding mean that the trail is much more primitive, and on a weekend when valet parking seemed advisable at the Undermountain Trailhead, primitive was just fine with me.Barrack Mountain, known affectionately by our student athletes as Heartbreak Hill, is a gorgeous hill, presiding over the high school and the Housatonic like a general on horseback, complete with a saddle and a gently sloping rump that ends at Dean Ravine. Up close, the nickname makes sense; the trail from Route 7 is a veritable wall, and a stabilizing hand is needed here and there to negotiate the steepest pitches.The “mountain” designation is perhaps a bit generous to this overgrown hill, though, and the suffering is short-lived. Like all great hikes, the effort is rewarded with a panoramic view of Lime Rock that provides a perfect perch from which to view the Fourth of July fireworks at Lime Rock Park or, on this day, a trio of turkey vultures riding thermals. From there, the trail descends into dense forest; it requires some fancy footwork to dance across fields of boulders en route to the falls at Dean Ravine.With Kent, Race Brook and the Great Falls nearby, Dean Ravine is often forgotten, but it is one of the taller falls in the area, with a tight chasm at the top that funnels the cataract over a series of cascades, ultimately feeding into the Housatonic. I found myself gazing at the torrent as it rushed by, saucer-eyed again on a Saturday morning. Ian Strever is the assistant principal at Housatonic Valley Regional High School in Falls Village.