The Woodland Trail Rule Almost No One in Dix Hills Knows About
August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
Saturday mornings at Dix Hills Park fill the Vanderbilt Parkway lot with a strange mix of vehicles: minivans with car seats headed for the pool, golf bags sliding out of trunks, and a steady stream of dog leashes clipping onto collars before their owners even close the car door. Everyone scatters across the same 152 wooded acres, but only one of those groups is walking under a specific legal carve-out that most of them have never heard of.
Suffolk County parks generally let you bring a leashed dog onto their trails without much fuss. The Town of Huntington does not work that way. Town parks default to no dogs on the trails at all, and Dix Hills Park's Woodland Trail is one of just four exceptions in the entire township.
That single fact changes how you should think about the loop you have probably walked a hundred times without asking why it was allowed in the first place.
The on-leash designation traces back to a pair of Town Board resolutions sponsored by then-Councilman Mark Cuthbertson, unanimously approved by the Huntington Town Board. Before that vote, dog walking on Huntington Town park trails was not a default right. It was something the town had to specifically carve out, trail by trail, and it only did so in four places:
Councilman Cuthbertson put it simply at the time:
"I am proud to have sponsored the legislation that designated on-leash dog walking in four Huntington locations."
The Town's official page for Dix Hills Park does not spell out the backstory, and most people who use the Woodland Trail treat it the way you would treat sidewalk access: obviously available, never questioned. It is worth knowing that it is not the town-wide norm. It is the result of a specific policy fight, championed by a specific Huntington Trails Committee, backed by the nonprofit LI-DOG, and opened with a ribbon cutting on the trail itself back in June 2014.
The Woodland Trail runs the perimeter of the park in a loop close to two miles, though the dog-walking group that helped secure it clocks the route closer to 1.9 miles at their organized pack walks. Either way, the surface is wood chip and dirt rather than pavement, the terrain has real hills in stretches, and tree cover keeps most of the loop shaded even in August. The route is easy to follow without a map: keep the perimeter fence on your right and you will end up back at the trailhead.
The rules that come with the designation are specific rather than suggested. Dogs stay leashed the entire time, retractable leashes are discouraged because they tangle easily when the trail gets busy, and you carry out what your dog leaves behind. None of that is unusual for a dog trail, but it is worth remembering that this particular trail exists at all only because someone lobbied for it, which is a different footing than assuming every wooded loop in a Huntington park welcomes a leash.
The trail is the part of Dix Hills Park that gets the most foot traffic from residents who already live here, but it sits inside a much larger footprint. The park opened in 1964 on Vanderbilt Parkway, a quarter mile east of Deer Park Avenue, and today it holds a 9-hole golf course, an outdoor pool, a summer day camp, and scattered picnic areas alongside the Woodland Trail itself.
Golfers and casual walkers use a separate, unpaved Fitness Trail that runs along the outskirts of the golf course. That path is not part of the four-trail leash designation, but it takes you past the pool and the ice rink on a longer loop than the Woodland Trail offers, which makes it a reasonable option if you have already done the perimeter walk that week and want a different stretch of the park.
Clark Gillies Arena sits inside the same park boundary, and its own history runs on a slower clock than the trail's. The original rink went up in 1974. A second ice surface was added when the building was expanded in 2010, which is why the facility can now run youth hockey, adult leagues, and public skating on separate sheets at the same time rather than juggling a single rink's schedule.
The rink is home to the Dix Hills Mites, the youth hockey program that trains on-site, and every year it turns into competition ice for the Dix Hills Summer Classic figure skating event. Entries for the 2026 competition closed on May 18, a detail worth knowing if you have a skater in the house and want to plan around next year's deadline rather than discover it after the fact.
Public skate pricing runs on the same Recreation ID structure the town uses across its facilities. A current fee sheet posted by the Town lists child sessions at $7 with a Recreation ID and $10 without, adult sessions at $9 with the card and $15 without, and senior sessions at $5 with the card and $10 without, with skate rentals running $5 and lockers a quarter of that. The specific public session hours shift by season, heavier on weekday afternoons during the school year and lighter through summer, so the card discount is the more durable fact here than any single week's posted schedule.
If you already walk the Woodland Trail, the practical takeaway is small but real: you are using one of four sanctioned dog-walking trails in a town with dozens of parks, and the wood chip surface plus real hills mean sturdier shoes serve you better than sneakers built for pavement. If you have not yet made the trip, the trailhead sign at the main lot marks the loop clearly enough that you will not need a map on your phone.
If skating is more your household's rhythm than hiking, keep an eye on the rink's posted session calendar before you drive over, since the schedule genuinely does move between the school-year evening sessions and the lighter summer slate, and the Recreation ID pays for itself after a handful of visits.
Either way, the park rewards the kind of attention that comes from actually living nearby rather than passing through once. Knowing why the trail works the way it does, and what it took to make that possible, is the kind of detail that turns a familiar loop into a small piece of local history you are walking through every week.
If you are weighing whether your own stretch of Dix Hills still fits where your life is headed, or you are simply curious what a home near a park like this one is worth in today's market, Team Calderon is a neighbor's phone call away. Get a Free Home Valuation whenever you are ready to talk it through.
Stay up to date on the latest real estate trends.
We pride ourselves in providing personalized solutions that bring our clients closer to their dream properties and enhance their long-term wealth.