The Day Colony Pool Closes, Chatham Township's Trail Season Gets Four Towns Wider

Today is Labor Day. By the time most families in Chatham Township finish their last cookout of the summer, Colony Pool Club's gates at Spring Street and School Avenue will already be locked for the season. The spring-fed pond that's been drawing swimmers since 1928, with its six 25-meter lanes and 8,300 square feet of beach sand, goes quiet until Memorial Day.

What doesn't get talked about enough is what happens on the other side of that closure. The township's outdoor recreation doesn't shrink when the pool shuts down. It gets bigger, and stranger in one specific way: the thing that expands to fill the space is run almost entirely by volunteers, while the thing that just closed spent the last year getting more professional oversight than it's had in decades.

A Pool That Needed Backup

Colony Pool had a rough end to its 2025 season. Township Parks and Recreation announced on August 22, 2025, that a sudden and unexpected resignation had left the club scrambling with just eleven days left before Labor Day. The pool stayed open, but the incident was enough to prompt a bigger change. For the 2026 season, Chatham Township brought in the Madison Area YMCA as a formal partner, handing over aquatic staffing, lifeguard training, and swim programming to an organization built to run pools professionally rather than leaving it to a seasonal management structure that had just proven fragile.

That's a meaningful shift for a facility this small. Colony Pool covers roughly 30,000 square feet of water. It has one address, one gate, one Facebook page for closure announcements. It's the kind of asset a town can wrap institutional support around because it's contained.

The Trail Network Nobody Really Runs

Compare that to what takes over once the pool closes. Chatham Township sits inside the Loantaka Brook Reservation, a Morris County Park Commission property that covers more than 850 acres and close to 10 miles of trail stretching across four municipalities: Chatham Township, Morris Township, Madison, and Harding. Within it, riders can book time at Seaton Hackney Stables, anglers can fish the five-acre Kitchell Pond, and hikers can pick between the Yellow, Blue, and Red Blaze sections depending on how far they want to go. None of that closes for the winter. None of it needs a swim instructor.

But the reservation isn't the only piece. The township's own Open Space Advisory Committee maintains a separate, smaller network entirely inside Chatham Township's borders, and the way that network is documented tells you something. The township's official trail map is a hand-assembled PDF, and the listed point of contact isn't a parks department extension. It's committee chair Joe Basralian's personal email and cell phone number. That's not a criticism of the committee, which clearly does the work. It's a fact about scale: the busier, more geographically sprawling half of the town's outdoor recreation runs on volunteer hours and a shared document, while the smaller, single-address pool just got a professional partner.

The local trail map itself is unofficial, distributed as a downloadable PDF rather than a maintained page, with the Open Space Committee's contact listed as a resident volunteer rather than a township office.

Here's the contrast laid out directly:

Where the Mileage Actually Is

If you're looking for something to do this week that doesn't involve a swim cap, here's what's actually within township limits or a short drive from it.

• Giralda Farms Trail is the flattest option in town: a 1.3-mile loop over crushed gravel through open meadow. It sits on a 136-acre tract that Morris County, Chatham Township, and the Park Commission jointly purchased in 2014 for about $14 million specifically to keep it from becoming commercial development. AllTrails users rate it 4.5 stars across 273 reviews, and it's the only trail in the immediate Chatham area classified as suitable for running or biking.
• Green Village Conservation Trail is a 1.2-mile forest loop with parking on the wide shoulder near Oak Knoll School. It's the more wooded, less manicured counterpart to Giralda Farms.
• Passaic River Trail runs about 2 miles along the riverbank, offering the closest thing Chatham Township has to a waterfront walk once the pool deck empties out.
• Great Swamp Outdoor Education Center, at 247 Southern Boulevard, is its own small network of color-coded trails built largely on boardwalk, with an observation blind for anyone who wants to watch for the birds and waterfowl that use the adjacent Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge.
• Loantaka Brook Reservation itself remains the anchor. Its Yellow Blaze section starts near the horse stables at South Street and runs south to Kitchell Road, where a five-acre pond gives anglers a reason to bring a rod along with their walking shoes.

None of these require a membership card. None of them close for a management transition.

The Other Half of the Handoff: Where the Kids Go

Pool closures hit families with young kids hardest, and Chatham Township has been quietly rebuilding two of its main playground options in the past year and a half, which means the timing lines up better than usual this fall.

Nash Field's playground, at 459 Southern Boulevard, went through a full tear-down starting April 14, 2026, funded in part by a $60,000 grant from the New Jersey Local Recreation Improvement Grant program awarded the year before. Mountainview Field's playground, next to the Municipal Building at 58 Meyersville Road, went through the same process starting May 12, 2025, backed by a separate $67,000 LRIG award. Both projects were framed by the township as ways to modernize aging equipment without raising local taxes, leaning on state grant money instead.

That's worth noticing alongside the trail situation. When Chatham Township has grant dollars to spend, they've gone toward fixed, contained assets: a pool partnership, two playground rebuilds. The trail network, which covers more ground and stays open more months of the year than either, hasn't seen a comparable infusion. It runs on county maintenance for the big reservation and volunteer hours for the smaller local loops, the same way it has for years.

Between Nash Park, Shunpike Park, Esternay Park, Mountainview Park, and the playground at Castle Park, families have plenty of contained options this fall. But the real shift, the one that outlasts the season, is that Chatham Township's outdoor life is about to spend nine months leaning almost entirely on a resource that gets less institutional attention than the one that just went dormant for the winter.

If you've been meaning to walk the Loantaka loop end to end, or finally check out the Giralda Farms meadow before the leaves turn, this is the week the town's calendar quietly hands you the invitation.

Whenever the conversation turns from where to walk this fall to what your Chatham Township home might be worth in this market, Gerri Perez Homes is glad to talk it through. Schedule your free, no-obligation consultation with Gerri whenever the timing is right for you.