All Blog Posts (324)

If you look at NYNJTC Jersey Highlands Trail Map 126 you will see the Highlands Trail leaving the map to the left at about the center of the map.  That is where this hike is, just off the map on the Highlands Trail.  It starts at Roland May Eves Mountain Inlet Sanctuary on Lake Hopatcong.  The first half of the hike all the way to Bear Pond is very pretty and quiet.  The second half which goes into Hopatcong Natural Area Preserve is also very pretty but runs along a ridge above Route 206 so…

Julian Capik Preserve is a small park in Sayreville that we've had on our list to check out when we needed a quick, close-by hike.

I first noticed this park several years ago after reading in the local paper that it was being cleaned up, the illegal ATV use being reduced, and trails being made. Since then we've meaning to check it out.

With only a vague idea of…

We did Daniela Wagstaff's Silvermine Lake/Turkey Hill Lake Loop Hike last Sunday.  Great hike, but problems w/blazes and trail conditions.

On our return route at the junction of Long Path & Popolopen Gorge Trail (going toward Turkey Hill Lake) we totally missed a left turn blaze on the (Red) Popolopen Gorge Trail. Or more likely, the double-blazes weren't there…

We only had one day open this weekend, and the forecast was for scattered thunderstorms all day. So to make it easy we grabbed the bikes and headed to Washington Crossing again.

Overall, this was a mostly a decent ride but not our fave part of the towpath, mainly due to crossing over in Trenton.

Route: – View in…

Hot summer weather always leads us to choose: "hike or bike?". The forecast this weekend made the choice easy. Saturday was supposed to be a bajillion degrees with dire heat warnings in effect. Sunday was shaping up for early-AM rain followed by afternoon thunderstorms... so with that sliver of available outdoors time, we tossed the bikes onto the car and headed over to the…

Keep this one in mind for a hot weather hike.  I had no idea until I finished around 1 pm that the real feel temperature was 100 degrees!  It was breezy and comfortable throughout this hike even with the heat and high humidity.  There were a few short sections through direct sunlight but just briefly before being back into the much cooler shade.  There were surprisingly few bugs - what a relief for a change!  The trails range from grassy woods roads to more challenging boulder hopping.  Some…

We decided on a bike ride due to the heat and hit up our old fave, The Delaware & Raritan Canal towpath starting from the Rocky Hill lot.

The towpath received some flood damage from the storms last year and there are a few closed or rerouted sections (be sure to check out the D&R Canal site). North and a…

After tooling around our GPS data the other day, I noticed a big empty spot where the Seven Hills and Hillburn-Torne-Sebago (HTS) trails are.

This loop isn't overly long at just under 8 miles, but there are enough hills and scrambling sections to rate it on the low end of "challenging".

The route is relatively tame until the big scramble up to the views on HTS…

I'd had Turkey Ridge trail in Wawayanda on my list for several few weeks but we inadvertently chose the worst possible day to do it... it was like the universe was against us... traffic delays, a bike race, and a thunder storm. Yep, it was one of those days. Now, of course, an annoying day on the trail is still better than a good day at work but...

We'd done…

On a whim we decided to revisit Baldpate Mountain on Memorial Day Weekend, as it had been over 2 years since we first checked it out (see "Baldpate Mountain – Ted Stiles Preserve" post) and we were looking for something under an hour…

The great thing about keeping a Trail Blog is being able to track info about your hikes – but the downside is that it underscores how quickly time passes.

I was sure we were just at Pyramid until I noticed that the last entry for it was over a year ago - and that was for the 
Butler…

We'd just been to Morristown National Park last fall and did the Grand Loop at Jockey Hollow, but is was not long after Snowtober had made a mess of hiking trails around the state and we wanted to hit the park in the Spring.

We really enjoy the Grand Loop and…

We decided to head over to the Black River Park in Chester as we hadn't been for about a year and a half, and that was during the fall so we wanted to head over in spring.

We parked at the Cooper Mill lot and took the Black River trail. A common turnaround spot is the intersection of Bamboo Brook Trail with Conifer Pass, but we kept on going as the…

Sometimes you get so familiar with a place that areas go overlooked.

I was flipping through 60 Hikes Within 60 Miles: New York City, yet again, but this time a spot on their Cheesequake hike map caught my eye - "Steamboat Landing".

Part of the allure of Cheesequake for us is that we can go without having to plan a route or look at the map and…

Back in July 2010 I hiked the entire Splitrock Reservoir loop but at that time the blazing was so horrible that the trails were almost impossible to follow.  In fact, I gave up, cut over to Charlotteburg Road, a dirt road that runs along the reservoir, then found a nicely blazed orange trail that connected me back over to the white-blazed Four Birds Trail, which was not as badly blazed as the blue trail but still very hard to follow.  I heard recently that the white and blue trails had been…

This warning at the foot of The Giant Stairs (trail) which skirts the Palisades Cliffs along the Hudson River is an understatement. 

We've done some bouldering and similar rock assaults as this one, but never over such a prolonged distance or precariously close to sheer drop offs - some w/vertigo-inducing distances to the rocks below or the river's edge.  …

An avid day hiker with 10+ years of footpath experience, averaging 3 hours on the trails per outing frequently within the Delaware River Basin and adjacent regions. The basin has hundreds of trails with a variety of terrain, the foot paths ranging from easy (smooth with gradual elevation gains) to challenging (scrambling over large rocks / boulders, with steep elevation gains).

I took advantage of a beautiful day on Friday and decided to head to Fair Hill NRMA in Maryland (actually right across the MD and DE border on Rte. 273) GPS told me it would take about 90 minutes, however, I under estimated the crappiness of the NJ Turnpike and I-95, and it took close to 2 hours.  Anyway, I have wanted to do this hike for a while as it is a beautiful area with primary rolling hills and a mix of open fields and woods trails. I decided to start on the orange trail which is a…

My wife and I are considering a tandem ride on the Columbia Trail this weekend.  Will we need a chainsaw or lifejackets?

Not too long ago there was an article in the local paper about a nature preserve in Cape May County that has received very little publicity, so I decided to check it out. I pulled it up on google and printed out the directions, which I soon learned were wrong ( I will give you the correct ones at the end.) This would be a very good hike to combine with Belleplain SF, as it is in the same forest area. No signage on the way there,  the first sign you will see is actually the parking area.…