Pull into the lot at 660 Terry Road on a Saturday afternoon and you'll see two entirely different kinds of gear coming out of car trunks. Near the front doors, it's skate bags and hockey sticks headed toward the rink. Near the back fence, past the tennis courts, it's mountain bikes getting lifted off tailgates and pointed toward a dirt fire road that most of the skate-bag crowd has never noticed. Both groups are standing on the same 97 acres. Almost none of them know it.
The building everyone calls The Rinx is only part of what the Town of Islip lists as Hidden Pond Park. The rest of it is a real trail network, built and kept up by volunteers, that most Hauppauge residents drive past on the way to a birthday party without ever walking into.
The Name on the Building Isn't the Name on the Deed
The Rinx has been the address's public face since it opened in 1993. It's one of four Long Island locations the company runs, alongside sites in Port Jefferson, Bethpage, and Wyandanch, and the Hauppauge campus is the one that combines an ice complex, a preschool academy, and a summer swim club on a single property. Two full-size indoor ice sheets run public skating, learn-to-skate classes, figure skating, and youth and adult hockey year-round. The Time Out Cafe hosts birthday parties. The Rinx Preschool Academy runs group skating lessons for kids as young as three. In summer, an Olympic-size pool, a diving pool, and a kiddy pool turn the same grounds into a swim club, and the accredited Hidden Pond Day Camp fills the property with campers.
That's the identity most people file under "Hauppauge, the rink." What the Town of Islip's own parks documentation calls the property, though, is Hidden Pond Park, and the town's park listing treats the rink as one tenant on a larger piece of land that also includes ball fields, handball and tennis courts, and a trail system that has nothing to do with ice or chlorine.
What Nine Miles Actually Looks Like
Enter from the same lot, walk past the courts, and the trail network that Trailforks tracks as the Hidden Pond Park region lists 19 mountain bike trails, 24 hiking trails, and 24 trail-running routes woven through the same acreage. The whole system adds up to about nine miles of distance and 735 feet of cumulative descent, small enough that regular riders treat it as a lunch-break loop rather than a destination, but varied enough that it has a real following. A status check logged earlier this summer marked the region open, and the network has more than 6,000 recorded rides and over 260 trail condition reports filed by users who know it well enough to bother writing one.
The trails have names, and the names tell you what to expect:
- Mellow Yellow is the warm-up loop, with views of the pond the park is named for.
- Glacier 8 (Blue Main Loop) climbs a switchback to a bench with a view north, then drops back down.
- Orange Palooza is one of the longest continuous downhill runs on Long Island, tight and technical enough that reviewers rate it for intermediate to advanced riders.
- Pink Floyd, sometimes logged as Pink-a-licious, is the network's other black-diamond option, looping off the Blue Main Loop for riders who want more.
The land manager of record is the Town of Islip, but the trails themselves were carved and are maintained by CLIMB, Concerned Long Island Mountain Bicyclists, a volunteer group that has been building singletrack on this hillside for over a decade. Riders sharing trail notes mention horses on the northern sections and hikers throughout, a reminder that this is genuinely shared-use ground, not a bike park with a fence around it.
The Trail That Leaves the Park
The Hidden Pond network doesn't dead-end at the property line. A route called the 347 Path to Hidden Pond connects the park to the Route 347 bike path, and this particular link isn't a CLIMB trail. It's maintained by the Long Island Greenbelt Trail Conference, a separate nonprofit that has built more than 200 miles of hiking paths across Long Island, including three National Recreation Trails, and leads over 200 free guided hikes a year using volunteer leaders.
That connection matters because it puts Hidden Pond Park on the map for hikers who have never heard of CLIMB or its mountain bike trails. Earlier this year, the Greenbelt group ran a guided out-and-back hike that started in the Hidden Pond Park lot, headed north through wetland sections the group warned could be muddy, and used the park's own parking Field E as the meeting point. A separate route on the conference's hike listings connects Lakeland County Park in Islandia to Hidden Pond Park directly, climbing the Ronkonkoma moraine, the glacial ridge that runs the spine of the island, along the way.
Put those pieces together and Hidden Pond Park isn't an isolated 97 acres. It's a junction where a CLIMB-built mountain bike network, a Greenbelt Trail Conference connector, and a county park to the south all meet at one parking lot that most visitors only associate with a hockey rink.
Why This Particular Month Matters
The Rinx's calendar and the trail network's calendar run on almost opposite schedules, and September is the one stretch where they briefly line up in the same visitor's favor.
Once Labor Day passes, the rink property's summer identity, the Olympic pool, the diving pool, the day camp, packs up for the season, and the building's calendar turns fully toward ice: public skating sessions, learn-to-skate classes, and the youth and adult hockey leagues that will run through winter. That's the same stretch of weeks when the trail side of the park is coming into its best condition of the year. The wetland sections the Greenbelt hike leaders flag as muddy tend to dry out once the heavier rain of late summer passes. The bugs that show up in trail reviews as a spring and summer nuisance thin out with the first cool nights. And the oak canopy along the moraine, the same ridge the Lakeland-to-Hidden Pond hike climbs, is heading into its color change.
For a family already coming to Terry Road for a Saturday skating lesson, that overlap means the same trip can cover two errands instead of one: drop a kid at the rink, then walk the Mellow Yellow loop or push a stroller around the park's edge while waiting, instead of treating the visit as a single-purpose stop.
The Practical Version
If you're coming for the trails specifically, park in the lot near the tennis and handball courts rather than the rink's front entrance. The gravel fire road heading west from there is the fastest way into the Mellow Yellow loop, and it's also the route CLIMB's own trail notes describe as the standard warm-up before the hillier sections to the south. If you're planning to cross Motor Parkway to extend a ride toward the powerline corridor, the crossing point is well marked in the Trailforks route data, and the trail on the far side continues as an out-and-back for however far you want to push it.
If you're coming for a guided hike rather than a solo ride or walk, the Long Island Greenbelt Trail Conference's hike listings are the place to check for a current schedule, since the group runs its hikes on a rotating calendar and posts meeting points and mileage for each one in advance. Bring water regardless of season. The wetland crossings on the northern routes are called out as a mud risk on the group's own hike descriptions, and that's true even in the drier fall months after a heavy rain.
And if the only reason you've ever pulled into 660 Terry Road is a birthday party invitation or a Saturday hockey practice, this is the month to walk the other half of the property before the rink's winter schedule fills back in and Terry Road goes quiet again until spring.
Hidden Pond Park is the kind of neighborhood detail that never shows up on a listing sheet but shapes how a Hauppauge weekend actually gets spent. If you're weighing what it's like to live near it, or thinking about a move that would put a property like this within walking distance, Bona Fide Fine Homes & Estates knows this stretch of Hauppauge well enough to talk through it honestly.
