Sleeping Giant (also known as the Blue Hills and Mount Carmel), (Hobbomock in Quinnipiac),[3] is a rugged traprock mountain with a high point of 739 feet (225 m), located eight miles (13 km) north of New Haven, Connecticut.

A prominent landscape feature visible for miles, the Sleeping Giant receives its name from its anthropomorphic resemblance to a slumbering human figure as seen from either the north or south.

The Giant's profile features distinct "head," "chin," "chest," "hip," "knee," and "feet" sections topographically represented by traprock outcrops and ridge crests.

A stone observation tower located on the Left Hip, built by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s,[7] offers 360° views of the surrounding Mill and Quinnipiac River valleys.

[7] It is part of the narrow, linear Metacomet Ridge that extends from Long Island Sound north through the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts to the Vermont border.

[8] Sleeping Giant, a fault-block ridge that formed 200 million years ago during the Triassic and Jurassic periods, is composed of traprock, also known as basalt, an extrusive volcanic rock.

Basalt is a dark colored rock, but the iron within it weathers to a rusty brown when exposed to the air, lending the ledges a distinct reddish appearance.

The basalt cliffs are the product of several massive lava flows hundreds of feet deep that welled up in faults created by the rifting apart of North America from Eurasia and Africa.

[5] According to Native Americans of the Quinnipiac Tribe, the giant stone spirit Hobbomock (or Hobomock), a prominent wicked figure in many stories (see Pocumtuck Ridge and Quinnipiac), became enraged about the mistreatment of his people and stamped his foot down in anger, diverting the course of the Connecticut River (where the river suddenly swings east in Middletown, Connecticut after several hundred miles of running due south).

[13] During the mid-19th century, spurred by the painters of the Hudson River School and transcendentalist philosophers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, an interest in mountains as a respite from industrialization and urbanization took hold in New England.

It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986 as part of the Connecticut State Park and Forest Depression-Era Federal Work Relief Programs Structures.

Trails specifically designed for horseback riding and cross-country skiing are located on the lower reaches of the Giant, and fishing is allowed in the abutting Mill River.

Sleeping Giant State Park encompasses 1,500 acres (6.1 km2); the SGPA remains active in securing additional parcels to add to the property.

The SGPA has also been instrumental in defeating attempts to log the Giant, build communications towers on its summits, and close the state park altogether.