In fall of 2025 I heard about Thomas Dambo, an artist who makes large sculptures, primarily of trolls. Many of these trolls are installed in public locations like parks, and you can go visit them. Turns out there aren't any in Massachusetts, but there are FIVE in Rhode Island. Well, it was late fall and winter is not a great time for wandering around in a random public park, so this project got put off. But finally in May 2026, Perry and I went to visit the Rhode Island trolls.
We figured out a loop that made sense and stuck it in Google maps. Google turns out to have the names of the trolls as destinations, but that turned out not really to be the best choice, because what it didn't have was the appropriate parking lot. So we kind of parked in the wrong place for most of them. But we did manage to see them all! We probably walked 2-3 miles in all. More careful planning would reduce that by about half.
The first troll is in East Providence on the river, named Mrs. Skipper. We missed the turn off to the parking lot and ended up parking at a nearby large medical center, where there was no way for them to know we didn't really belong there. It didn't add much to our walk down to the waterfront.
There is a little pier from which you can view the troll. There were signs saying we should not walk down on the rocks because they are slippery, but we decided to ignore that and walked down on the rocks so we could view it from other angles. The boat is much bigger than a canoe!
We drove to the next troll, Iver Mudslider, which was in North Kingstown. When we had viewed it in satellite mode, it had appeared that we would be able to drive much closer, but it turned out that there was a barrier across the dirt road, so we had quite a long walk. There was another parking area less distance on the other side which we learned about from other troll viewers. We encountered other viewers at all the sites, most of whom were doing the same thing we were, but mostly in the reverse direction.
We first encountered this constructed tree, obviously made by the same artist, which confused us, because "this doesn't look like a troll". Then we heard some people further along in a stand of trees, and they turned out to be at the right place. This time I got Perry to stand next to it so we could have a sense of scale. These things are huge!
Back in the car to Ninigret Park where there are two trolls, Erik Rock and Greta Granit. We had a lot of trouble finding parking, because apparently we came in some back entrance to the park, and it kept telling us to turn on various paths that were blocked off with cones or rocks. We eventually parked in the adjacent senior center (which also had a restroom, which I needed). Later while walking to both of these trolls we figured out where we should have parked, and noticed that there were a number of portapotties. The first two locations did not seem to have any restroom facilities.
We did Erik Rock first. There is a nice entryway before you actually get to the troll. Unlike the trolls, it is appropriately sized for humans.
Greta Granit was a good half-mile walk across the park, terminating in a kind of twisty path to get to a circle of stones in which she was seemingly sitting at a table. I thought her hair was particularly cool, made out of some kind of reeds.
By this time we were getting a little hungry. The roads we were driving on didn't seem like they had much in the way of businesses on them so we were quite pleased when we came upon an ice cream shop (the Back Road Creamery) at the corner of Rhode Island routes 2 and 112 before our last stop at Browning Mill Pond in Arcadia to see "Young Boulder". Here Google maps helped us find the right place down a dirt road on the other side of a river from the main entrance to a park and there was an obvious place for about 3 cars.
Young Boulder doesn't exactly look young, shown balding with a long beard.
Then we drove home, getting caught in extra Providence rush-hour traffic due to a crash on 295. That was okay; I let the car do most of the driving. Total: about 3.5 hours of driving (150 miles) and about 2.5 hours of non-driving activity (walking, looking, eating ice cream).
I loved the attention to detail in all of these statues. Every foot and hand has toenails/fingernails, and every foot has little toe pads. Some of the feet actually show arches. The hair is amazing. Most of them have birdhouses somewhere (sized for an actual bird), like on a necklace, or in Young Boulder's case, on the end of his fishing pole.
These installations are pretty recent: two of them were installed in 2024 and three of them in 2025.