NY NJ Highlands Hiker Home Welcome To The Website Of George Petty
New From the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference
Hiking The Jersey Highlands:
Wilderness In Your Back Yard
For the many Metro area residents who want to walk in unspoiled woodlands, the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference announces the publication of Hiking The Jersey Highlands, Wilderness in Your Back Yard. The creation of this book is a tribute to conservationists and voters who have supported the preservation of the Highlands.
Hiking the Jersey Highlands is the first published guide to 35 of the most beautiful hikes in the picturesque Highlands extending from the New York - New Jersey border to the Delaware River. It is written as an invitation to new hikers, and experienced hikers who haven't walked Highlands trails, to discover its forests and watercourses. The book includes a map for every hike, sections on Highlands history, geology, forests, and wildlife, and a 16 page color insert of wildflowers photographed along the trails.
The hikes range in difficulty from starters for woodland beginners to challenges for fit and experienced hikers. Directions to the trailhead by car and by public transport when available are included. The detailed hike descriptions include trail photos, notes on scenic overlooks, area history, and wildlife and plants likely to be seen on the hike.
The author, George Petty, is a long time resident of the Jersey Highlands, an experienced hiker, a NYNJTC volunteer trail maintainer, and associate naturalist for wildflowers at the New Jersey Audubon Society Weis Ecology Center in Ringwood, NJ.
Excerpts from the introduction to Hiking The Jersey Highlands
SCENES FROM A HIGHLANDS MOUNTAINTOP
By George Petty:
It's a sultry June day on the summit of Wyanokie High Point, 920 feet high in the northeast corner of the New Jersey Highlands. People in the towns below swelter, and to the east the New York City skyline steams in the humid air, but up here a steady breeze drifts in from the higher mountains to the west. Hikers come up here in all seasons, under different skies; sometimes the air swirls, bursts in gusts, or tries to carry you away, but always it moves, like the tides of an invisible sea.
Those tides run back into all kinds of histories, whose consequences are part of the scenery. To the northeast on the ridge of Ramapo Mountain you can see recent housing developments, lines of town-houses along Skyline Drive. The great Wanaque Reservoir below to the east, completed in 1930, covered 70 homesteads, farms and commercial buildings of the Wanaque River valley to supply the growing cities of North Jersey with essential water. Streaks of rusty color in the rocks of High Point summit show the iron content of Highlands gneiss, which in rich veins was a source of iron ore for the rebellious colonies and the thriving nineteenth century iron industry of New Jersey. The smooth summit of High Point was polished about 15,000 years ago by the abrasion of ice and rocks embedded in the mile-thick Wisconsin glacier, and a close look at the summit rocks will show you small flecks of crystalline quartz and feldspar formed during a continental collision thousands of millions of years ago, just as visible life was beginning to appear on our planet. Hundreds of millions of years of erosion by water and wind have worn them down to the crystalline rock foundations you sit on now.
Although the view from the top of High Point will seem much the same next week, and even next year, the world of the Highlands is not static, but the product of processes of change proceeding on time scales ranging from decades to eons. Every day, grain by grain, water and wind erode the rock of High Point summit, carrying it down to the soil below, into brooks and streams, and finally to the sea. There it is deposited on the continental shelf, and pushed deep into the crust of the Earth to form new sedimentary rock, which awaits the next collision of continents to be raised into mountains again.
On this mountaintop, where you sit quietly in a soft breeze, you are part of many natural cycles that create new forests, watercourses, mountains, and civilizations out of the remains of the old. And every year, in another important cycle, new hikers, young and old, make their way to the summit of Wyanokie High Point to appreciate the beauty of the Highlands, and to wonder how their generations may influence its future.
The Extent of the Jersey Highlands
The New Jersey Highlands are 1,250 square miles of rugged hills in a narrow triangle extending about 100 miles from the New York State border to the Delaware River. The Highlands are 23 miles wide and 1,300 feet high between Vernon and Mahwah in the north, diminishing to 8 miles wide and 500 feet high at Phillipsburg in the south. From the air, the Highlands today are a mostly forested swath of steep hills and valleys, dotted with hundreds of ponds, lakes and reservoirs, and an increasing number of growing suburban communities.
Highlands Topography
The unusual geology of the Jersey Highlands offers the hiker opportunities and challenges not found in other areas of the state. The tectonic faulting of the Highlands bedrock, ages of erosion, and recent glaciations have produced a tightly packed series of broken ridges, separated by narrow valleys with small running streams feeding into larger watercourses. Because the Highlands have been so broken and folded, the hiker can find in them both short and long hikes offering varieties of terrain and views. A short Highlands hike of an hour or two can take you through moist slopes, dry ridgetops, long views from bedrock ledges, glacial boulder fields, changes in vegetation, and startling geological surprises. Every hike in this book offers a scenic water view, perhaps of a vast reservoir, a glacial lake or pond, a waterfall or a substantial stream. When you have completed one of the longer hikes, you will have been up and down more times than you can remember, been physically tested, and enjoyed many beautiful and varied views along the way.
The Survival of the Jersey Highlands
 The history of the Jersey Highlands records the complex interaction between the economic exploitation of its natural resources, the protection of its watersheds to supply growing cities, and the more recent desire of urban and suburban populations for homesites and recreation with access to its nearby natural beauty.
From earliest times the topography of the Highlands has made them resistant to farming. The Native Americans of North Jersey, the Minsi, made their permanent agricultural settlements in the Upper Delaware River Valley, and used the rugged hills mostly for hunting. The colonists bypassed them in favor of level and fertile land to the south and north. During the American Revolution and for most of the nineteenth century, the Highlands forests were leveled to provide wood fuel for a thriving iron industry, and industrial settlements grew up around the forges (see the remains of the Hibernia Mines on the Wildcat Ridge Loop, Hike #2, and the Long Pond Ironworks on Hike #21 of my new book), "Hiking The Jersey Highlands" by George Petty. But western competition gradually forced the mines to close, and the depleted forests were allowed to regenerate.
 The Highlands in the early twentieth century was an area of a few small rural towns, some small commercial and subsistence farms and dairy operations, and declining iron towns and abandoned forge complexes. The hills began to develop slender forests in various stages of recovery. The first edition of the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference’s New York Walk Book, published in 1923, quotes a surveyor saying of the Wyanokie Highlands that they are “too wild and too worthless to be taxed," and that "in these areas it is possible for a man to get thoroughly lost while still in sight of the Woolworth Building.”
As late as 1950, an aerial photograph shows suburban growth stopping at the eastern rise of the Highlands. In spite of the incursions of agriculture and iron industry, for 200 years the rugged topography had preserved them from becoming part of cities and their suburbs.
Suburban Development Enters the Highlands
Beginning in the years after World War II, both federal and state governments invested large amounts of money in improved highways. At the same time, the need of expanding city populations for family housing put pressure on undeveloped areas of the state. Gradually, the insistent growth of the suburbs spread along the new roads, breaching the natural defenses of the Highlands. By the end of the twentieth century, Highlands forests in New York and New Jersey were being consumed by housing development at the rate of 5,000 acres every year.
The conflict between developing the Jersey Highlands and preserving them had reached a crucial stage.
Preserving the Wilderness in Your Back Yard
The New Jersey state government, in a bipartisan collaboration, began responding to this situation in 1961 by proposing a bond issue to provide funds to purchase farms and woodlands statewide to be preserved from development for their historic or recreational value. Called the Green Acres Program, the proposal was approved by the voters, who have in the past 45 years overwhelmingly approved nine bond issues for the same purpose. The Green Acres Program has announced the Highlands will receive special attention in its acquisitions planning: “Serving as a spectacular green belt around some of the nation's most densely populated cities and suburbs, the majority of the Highlands' mountains, ridges, forests, and fields are privately held and therefore are vulnerable to development. Preservation of the greenbelt is critical to ensuring the integrity of New Jersey's water supplies and maintaining the state's biodiversity.”
Private individuals also led opposition to unrestricted housing development in Highlands hills and forests. In a typical case, Mrs. Lucy A. Meyer, of Montville, organized local opposition to the development of nearby Pyramid Mountain. She was able to gain support from local officials to delay approvals for construction, and eventually put together a coalition of state, county, municipal and private funding sources to purchase the land for a fair price from the developer. In 1987, the area was turned over to the Morris County Park Commission to become one of the most popular hiking areas in the Highlands. Her work is commemorated in Lucy’s Overlook on the Pyramid Mountain Loop (Hike #6). A similar campaign by concerned citizens helped preserve the land around Ryker Lake (Hike #10). In all such campaigns, patience and dedication is required; it took twenty years of constant effort for Lucy Meyer and her colleagues to win their battle.
 Ryker Lake and 2,000 acres around it was saved from development by the efforts of an organization of local residents called The Friends of Sparta Mountain, with the cooperation of the New Jersey Green Acres Program, the Victoria Foundation, and the New Jersey Audubon Society.]
In 1988, a group of conservation organizations, including the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference, formed the Highlands Coalition to advocate legislation to prevent further uncontrolled development in the entire Highlands area from Connecticut to Pennsylvania. At the latest count, 110 organizations have joined the Coalition. In 2004, the Highlands Coalition efforts, with the support of then Governor James McGreevey, a Democrat, led to the passage of the Highlands Water Protection and Planning Act by the New Jersey Legislature.
The demand for urban water resources made the preservation of the Jersey Highlands a public issue of the first importance. In Congress, Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen, a Republican of the 11th District, led the effort to have a federal study define the importance of the Highlands resources, and subsequently introduced legislation to authorize funds to help preserve the Highlands. This law, the federal Highlands Conservation Act, was passed in 2004, and signed into law by President George W. Bush.
As result of these public and private efforts, the equitable long-term preservation of the Jersey Highlands is within reach. The conflicts continue, but the legal machinery for preservation is in place. According to the Highlands Coalition, 25 million people live within a two-hour drive of the Highlands. We hope this website will encourage all of those citizens to appreciate and help preserve the resources and recreational opportunities offered by this wilderness in their back yard.
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