Somers Has 654 Acres Of Trails Most Residents Have Never Walked

Robert Scorrano grew up in Somers. He's the town supervisor now, and even he avoided Angle Fly Preserve for most of his life. Not because he didn't know it existed. Because the entrance felt closed off, tucked behind a stretch of condos that nobody wanted to drive past. "I knew that the condos were bad," he told the Somers Record earlier this year. "We never went back there at all. It was taboo."

That's an odd thing for a town official to admit about 654 acres of publicly protected land sitting in the geographic middle of his own town. It's also the reason this is worth a second look this season. If the supervisor didn't go, there's a decent chance you haven't either, or you went once in 2010 and never returned.

The preserve that's been hiding in plain sight

Angle Fly Preserve was assembled in 2006 through a joint purchase by the Town of Somers, Westchester County, New York State and New York City, and it opened to hikers in 2009 with a single 1.3-mile trail. Somers Land Trust volunteers spent the next decade and a half blazing new paths, building bridges and bog planking, and sponsoring Scout projects until the network grew to roughly 10 miles, stretching from Reis Park in the north down to Route 35 in the south. In 2023, responsibility for maintaining the preserve shifted from the Land Trust to the town itself.

That transition is why there's real news to report this year, not just a trail description copied from a brochure. In March 2026, the Somers Town Board authorized the engineering firm Woodard & Curran to develop a master plan for a 15-acre section of the preserve centered on the Silas Reynolds House, a Revolutionary War-era structure that Somers Land Trust volunteers and a small army of local companies rebuilt to retain its original footprint. The targeted area includes a pond, a native plant garden, and a small yellow barn, and Cornell Cooperative Extension has already weighed in on which plants belong there.

"By making the entryway more welcoming, not only will there be a new place for people to congregate, it will draw more attention to the rest of the property. It'll be a huge plus for the town of Somers."

That's Scorrano again, describing the goal of the plan. The town isn't trying to build something new so much as fix the reason people stopped going in the first place.

What's already there if you walk in this weekend

You don't need to wait for the master plan to use the preserve. The main trailhead sits on Primrose Street, half a mile south of Reis Park, and you can also pick up the network behind the tennis courts at Reis Park itself or off Plumbrook Road. Once inside, the Yellow Trail and the main Red Trail are the two you're most likely to follow, and both got fresh aluminum blazes in 2025 courtesy of Scouts from Pack 1, Pack 319, Troop 228, and Troop 376, who also cleared brush around the old stone patio near the chicken coop and flagged downed trees for the parks department. The trails cross Angle Fly Brook, named for the last naturally spawning brook trout stream in Westchester County, and pass rock walls and building ruins that date back nearly 250 years.

None of this requires a permit or a fee. It does require knowing it's there, which was apparently the whole problem for two decades.

Angle Fly isn't the only trail Somers residents overlook

The town's own recreation department maintains a trail directory that covers three other properties most people driving through Somers on Route 190 have never noticed. Here's how the four stack up against each other:

Whitaker Woods is a 266-acre property maintained with the Northern Connecticut Land Trust and the Somers Open Space & Trails Committee, and every trail on it is also open to horses except the Overhill and Under Hill Trails. McCann Family Farm's Jerry Stage Trail connects, via the Forest View Trail, all the way to the summit of Soapstone Mountain, a 3.2-mile trip if you start at the Whitaker Woods lot on Wells Road. And Bald Mountain, at 1,121 feet, is the highest point in the entire town, though the only marked way up is that one trail off County Road. Everything else on the ridge is unofficial.

If Muscoot Farm, straddling the Katonah-Somers line, is your default outdoor stop, it's worth knowing the rules there are different from everything above. Muscoot doesn't allow dogs at all, a policy the farm enforces because its resident livestock get spooked by unfamiliar animals. Its Sunday farmers market runs May through November, and the 2026 season opened May 10, but if you're bringing a dog along on a weekend outing, Muscoot is the one property on this list where that plan doesn't work.

The town is quietly investing in access, not just acreage

The Angle Fly master plan isn't the only sign that Somers has been working on this. Back in 2024, the town installed a new double-sided LED sign at the Reis Park entrance specifically to make upcoming programs and activities more visible to people driving by, with more sitework and landscaping planned from there, and a Reis Park expansion has come up in town supervisor meetings since. None of this is dramatic. It's the same pattern as the Angle Fly project: small, deliberate moves to lower the barrier between residents and land the town already owns.

If you've lived in Somers for years and your mental map of the town's outdoor space starts and ends with Muscoot's farmers market, that map is smaller than the town actually is. Four separate trail systems, a mountain summit, and a 654-acre preserve with a Revolutionary War house at its center sit within a few minutes of each other, and at least one of them has spent seventeen years being avoided by the people who technically own it.

That's usually the moment worth paying attention to. Trails that a town is actively investing in tend to be the ones that see the most improvement over the next few seasons, whether that shows up as better signage, new parking, or simply more neighbors on the path when you go.

If you're already thinking about what makes a town like Somers work, from its open space to its schools to the actual day-to-day texture of living here, that's exactly the kind of local read Marcie Nolletti brings to every conversation about buying or selling in this market. Let's Connect if you want to talk about what's next, whether that's a hike this weekend or a move down the road.