June 2014 Hikes and Events!

Hey everybody!
We've got more great stuff coming up for the month of June!
There are a lot of great things coming up regarding the planning, development, maintenance, and promotion of the area trail systems...
This Summer, we have some epic hikes planned, and there will be a few changes with how I've been organizing things.
First, all Summer hikes are intended to have swimming spots, or at least somewhere we can get wet. This Summer is no exception. Every hike will have time and places to jump into water!
Next, we will be doing some more high adventure trips in addition to some shorter and long night hikes. The regular Sunday hikes are going to be a bit more extreme than some of the things we've been doing, but not to worry, there are often going to be alternative routes and/or early out points for those who don't want to do the tougher stuff. If you have a question regarding any trip, don't hesitate to ask!

Furthermore, with the great success of the Metrotrails meetup group, I am scaling back on other outside promotion. Most notably, I will not be posting half as many hikes through the NY/NJ/PA Hiking group on Meetup. We've met a lot of amazing people through that group, but some of the hikes I will be posting are not geared toward beginners, and it has been causing some problems. That group is limiting group sizes to 25; while I feel that is a fine number of participants, at least 30% of those who sign up for  hikes do not show up. On our anniversary  hike this year, we had 75 participants, but 72 who were signed up simply did not show up or un-RSVP'd overnight before the event. Because of this limitation, the knee jerk reaction of people is to sign up for anything posted, whether they plan to go or not. The group is also imposing several other rules I disagree with, and the wordiness of their typical postings is causing people not to read pertinent information posted on my announcements (and other leaders answer questions regarding my hikes, which they know nothing about). Participants have been showing up prepared for five miles, not fifteen, for example.
As a result, I've opted to keep most of the great hikes posted exclusively through Metrotrails. It's time to promote the great things we have going on rather than give the credit to someone else's group. I will occasionally post through that group to bring in more newcomers, as well as to promote hikes that might have low participation because they're out of the way (beach or Jersey Perimeter hikes).
Next, I would like to welcome Dan Lurie officially to our Leadership Team! We've got a great bunch of leaders and co-leaders who have been augmenting the already interesting Metrotrails schedule, and Dan has begun posting some great stuff too. He recently substituted for me while I was backpacking in Maryland with a Goffle Brook/Trolley line hike that looked great.
I'd also like to thank the other leaders in the group for helping out along the way either leading or co-leading. It's great to have talented friends I can depend on in such a capacity!
Of course, there is our schedule of upcoming events...
Here's our schedule:
June 1: High Falls and New Paltz rail beds, canals, and mines! A point to point near New Paltz NY! This is the missing link! After completing this hike, we will have connected other hikes as far north as Amsterdam NY on the Erie Canalway Trail!
June 6: Friday night hike focusing on the new Warren Highlands Trail route, which we'll be pushing through across Warren County!
June 8: Gregg Hudis and Dan Lurie will once again be filling in for me with a hike along rail beds and trails in southern Sussex County near Stanhope (look for the announcement soon).
June 15: Pennsylvania Dutch country hike that begins with a tour of Crystal Cave ($9 per person at group rate). We'll continue to trace an old rail route and back roads.
June 22: Long Beach Island central loop. One of two loop hikes remaining on LBI, and one of 28 remaining to finish the entire perimeter of NJ!
June 29: Ramapo-Ringwood Hike, another of the Jersey Perimeter series, this hike will be very difficult and include both on and off trail from the Mahwah area. It will include a good amount of bushwhacking in addition to the trails.
July 7: An atypical Monday hike, because I am stuck working that Sunday on 4th of July weekend, we will be doing a very difficult twenty mile hike on and off trail in Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area as well as Bear Swamp Wildlife Management Area. This hike is NOT good for beginners!
July 12-13: Tentatively planned Saturday night camp out at Otter Creek on the Susquehanna Railroad with Mason Dixon Trail hike to Lock 12 the following day. This hike is an opportunity for an intro to backpacking. An additional day may be possible. More details to come on this trip.
July 20: Cape May Loop Hike, another in the NJ Perimeter series!
July 27: Wanaque Loop Hike, another in the NJ Perimeter series, and the last of the north border!
Sept 21: Mark your calenders for our Common Sense For Animals fund raiser hike! Details may change, but the trip will be almost entirely different than the one we did last year, and a $25 donation gets all participants lunch and a tee shirt! It's a worthy cause!
In addition to these trips, look out for regular night hikes starting up again very soon! Jersey Perimeter hikes will continue at least once a month until finished.
So what of Planning and Development?
Our biggest project is the Warren Highlands Trail. Developing this trail has been an outstanding experience. Warren County has been a pleasure to deal with all along the way from the Freeholders who support the project, to the Planning Department, Department of Land Preservation, Board of Recreation Commission, and of course volunteers. This week, the Warren County Board of Chosen Freeholders made a Proclamation that June is National Outdoors Month. As Chairman of the Board of Recreation, I was honored to attend and speak about the development of the trail system, as well as do a radio interview about it.
The trail itself is coming along very nicely. In the past month, we have finally completed the trail from the Marble Hill state park property down to Belvidere Road. The trail now follows the old farm road down past the pile of rocks (the remains of the old Harmony Twp School), then turns left into a swath of woods, weaving around a bit. It then reaches Belvidere Rd, and turns left to follow the road for a time.
Soon, the trail turns right into the county owned Geiger Tract. It skirts the edges of the fields, now marked with carsonite posts and on trees. It passes through a swath of woods, crosses a stream, and then follows two more fields before it's current terminus on Stryker's Road at Farmer's Fairgrounds.
As of today, we have been officially given permission for the trail to pass through the Merril Creek Nature Preserve. We have also been given permission to connect the trail on their right of way and through state land to the Hoff-Vanetta Farmstead. This is huge news. I hope to have the trail completed through to Washington by September.
We have scouted other properties beyond Washington for possible acquisition, and have begun discussing land review process to open the trail through state Wildlife Management Area tracts.
Making new connections:
As always, I am continuously branching out to new places, trying to connect everything by foot. As of this Sunday, the furthest north we will have reached will be Amsterdam, NY. The furthest east is part of Long Island at Brooklyn, and the farthest south has been Cape May.
However, this past week Jillane and I nearly connected everything to Baltimore Maryland. One hike on the Mason Dixon Trail remains in order to connect what we covered with previous hikes. We covered 114 miles.
The trip took us from Otter Creek, along the Mason Dixon Trail just north of where I'd last left off to the north, to Druck Valley, then onward to York, PA, now the furthest west we've ever reached. From there, we followed the Northern Central Rail Trail south to Baltimore County, Maryland. We continued south across Baltimore from there.
Just as we will connect the northern reaches of these trips this Sunday, we will connect this with a hike tentatively scheduled for July 13.
Depending how things go, I'd like to post another two day trip in August at the southern Catskills to connect some other stuff. Another trip I have been looking at would connect Harveys Lake PA with Ricketts Glen. I am planning on doing more complicated group trips that will involve camp outs and blocks of motels to travel a bit further away, maybe on a monthly basis. I feel we can improve the diversity of places offered through this group by continuing with these such events everyone can enjoy.

Finally, we still have plenty of large and XL Metrotrails tee shirts for $10 a piece! This helps us to keep the website and Meetup group going!

Thanks everyone who has continued to come out! The trips continue to get better all the time, and I'm blessed to have such a great group of people to affiliate with!

Best Regards
M'ke  Helbing
President
Metrotrails

Coming Up, May 2014

Hey everyone!

We have a lot of great stuff coming up as we prepare for the Summer!

First off, this message is being sent to both my mailing list that I've maintained since 1998, as well as the newer meetup ones. For those of you who are not already on Meetup.com, you might find it easier to have a look at our meetup group page for further details on what's coming up and make plans accordingly. It's free to use and a great resource.

For this posting, I'll details some of what is coming up, and then give a little background on where else we're going, and why...

After this week's Lehigh Gap hike, we will shift full swing into hikes that are intended to have swimming spots. These will continue through September.
May 11: After having a night hike the previous Thursday, we'll make the Jersey Perimeter hike for the month of May another missing beach section. We'll be doing a loop in Brigantine, which is one of the sections we passed by last Summer while working our way toward Cape May.

May 17: We'll try to get some trail work trips in there, but May 17th, Saturday, is Warren County Land Preservation Day. I will be leading a four mile loop around White Lake Natural Resource Area and discuss the geology, history, and ecology of this very special place I once called home. I'll then be manning the Metrotrails table at the event tent to answer your local trail questions. Canoes and kayaks will also be available free!

May 18: I will be departing for my annual Spring backpack trip with Jillane, and so for the two weekends I will be gone, I leave the weekly Metrotrails group hikes in the able hands of a couple of my friends.

For the first Sunday, join my good friend and long time Metrotrails member William "Guillermo" Fabel as he leads the group through some of the known and unknown parts of the Hamburg area Blue Mountain.

May 25: Filling in for me on this occasion will be Dan Lurie, prominent leader among the NJ Nomads and regular long distance hiker. Dan has been a part of the Metrotrails family for well over a year now, and has already organized some amazing hikes with the group.

This one looks to be no exception, a route that pieces together parks including Goffle Brook, an old trolley line, Glen Rock, and much more. This is an area that even I have not yet covered in all of my travels! Sure to be good!

6/1: I return from my backpacking trip to lead the final connector I've been working toward between New Paltz and High Falls, New York, which will include an amazing abandoned rail line, the old Delaware and Hudson Canal, and incredible old mines.
I'll elaborate more on the connectivity soon, read on....

6/8 I will again be doing a weekend trip with Jillane for her birthday, and so Gregg Hudis, long time Metrotrails member and leader through other groups, including NYNJ Trail Conference (he maintains Four Birds Trail), will take the lead once again!
His hike has not yet been posted, but watch the schedule for what he has coming up. I'm certain it will be great!

6/15: I return to host a trip to Crystal Cave in PA, as well as some back roads and abandoned railroads moving on with a series I have not re-visited since July of 2007!

We'll close out June with more Jersey Perimeter, another beach hike loop the 22nd, this time at Long Beach Island, and one up by Ringwood on the 29th.

In other news, we have just completed clearing and marking the Warren Highlands Trail out of the Marble Hill properties.  Hikers can now follow the teal rectangle Warren Highlands Trail blazes from the Free Bridge in Phillipsburg all the way across Marble Hill and out to Belvidere Road, then out to the Geiger Tract where blazing currently ends. I will continue to work on this over the next month, and scouting hikes will resume on next properties. Two meetings next week will help to determine some of the next moves.

In the media, the latest article featuring Metrotrails comes from the Times-Leader, top newspaper for the Scranton/Wilkes Barre area. We were fortunate to be joined by Mary Therese Biebel , a reporter with the Times Leader, as well as photographer Peter G. Wilcox who took some amazing photos on this, his second hike with us.
The article can be read here:
http://www.timesleader.com/news/features/1309170/A-hike-with-Mike
Soon, we'll be in the Ocean Signal, as it is re-launched with an article by Erik Weber. He's going to give us some PR on the Jersey Perimeter series.

The hikes themselves have been awesome.

As in the beginning, I am constantly trying to connect each hike we've done with ones we've previously done. There have been a couple of occasions where there has been a hike that did not connect, but I work very quickly to connect it. That becomes a priority.
I had an issue with connectivity last year regarding the backpacking trip I took in September. I didn't know how far we would make it, or how I could connect it with everything else.
I had spent years exploring the Kittatinny Mountains in NJ, and it's extension, the Blue Mountain out into Pennsylvania, but as that range continues north out of NJ, it becomes known as the Shawangunk Ridge. I'd begun covering the ridge there in the same way I had in NJ and PA, with loops where possible, constantly working further north.

The Shawangunk Ridge Trail and the Long Path became the northbound route along the ridge. We explored amazing places like Basha Kill Wildlife Management Area, the D&H Canal, and the old Port Jervis Branch of the NY, Ontario, and Western Railroad bed.

At every turn, we were exploring more abandoned places, more old rail lines, more back woods trails. With each trip, the Metrotrails world got larger.
The Long Path continues north of Wurtsboro on the ridge, and when it reaches the town of Cragsmoor, it changes character to being even more open and rocky.

We continued on to explore more of the Gunks and the Long Path, with Sam's Point Preserve, the ice caves, and more in a few more loop hikes.
We had some truly outstanding trips exploring waterfalls, more ice caves, old berry picker villages, and some of the most far reaching vistas we'd ever seen.

We had in 2013 finally reached well into Minnewaska State Forest Preserve and were covering a lot of interesting stuff there. The Long Path continues north from there on it's journey toward the Adirondaks, and Jillane and I followed it down to the D&H Canal, which we used for a loop once again. We otherwise covered some other trails to the north of there.
In September, we started off in Sharon Springs, a forgotten little northern Catskills town where we spent a day exploring old resorts.

We hiked out of the beautiful northern foot hills to the Catskills and out into the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor. Our route included back roads and a few small park lands until we reached the little town of Canajoharie, where the Erie Canalway Trail passes through. We then got on that trail and followed it eastbound, along the Mohawk River.

We continued east to where the trail ended, and the farthest north we reached on the entire trip was the town of Amsterdam. We camped at some amazing spots, some convenient spots, and utilized the Erie Canalway Trail, as well as back roads and abandoned railroad rights of way.

Along the way, we learned a lot about the area and it's rich history.
We continued easy to where the Long Path passed over the Mohawk River. It follows the Erie Canalway Trail for a time. We turned onto the Long Path and followed it south for a while, and it seemed like this would be the only way I could connect what we were doing with everything else we had done. But that would take a very very long time.

We turned off of the Long Path and returned to the Erie Canalway Trail by way of back roads, then hiked in to the town of Schenectady. From here, we had limited time left, and the plan was to get to Albany so that we could take a bus back from there.
We headed south following a lot of roads, but we were still able to explore a few preserves along the way.

Our backpacking trip ended at the SUNY college in Albany. The bus picked us up from there and took us directly back to NJ.
After the trip, I became obsessed with connecting this with everything else I'd done. I didn't know enough about the area, and I wanted to feel the physical connection, how it all fit, in part so that I could appreciate it more.
One night soon after the trip, while looking at Google Earth, I thought back to when I was in high school. The year was 1997, and I had finished my first couple twenty mile day hikes. We completed Hike #1, twenty miles, in 7.5 hours. Multiplied by three, that is 22.5 hours, so in theory, I thought, I should be able to walk sixty miles in one day. I started trolling my friends to see who might be interested in trying. There was initial interest, but no one ever truly stepped up and said they would do it.

There are so many things we leave undone in life, and for me, this was one of them. I knew I could do it, and I had sort of accepted that no one would ever try it with me.
When I saw that Albany was roughly sixty miles north of Kingston, the idea struck me. From Kingston, it would be very easy to connect with everything I've ever done before by way of existing trails, and they would be good hikes. Between Albany and Kingston looked to be a lot of back roads and not as interesting, and much of it would be fine to do in the dark. If I could get someone to join me, I could attempt both my sixty mile day hike and connect where I left off in Albany with Kingston! I was greatly surprised and honored to have Tom Vorrius, Matt Davis, Justin Gurbisz and Dan Lurie all sign on to join me for this venture.
We started off at the SUNY college, where Jillane and I had left off, and began heading south. I looked over the maps to no end, trying to find interesting routes to walk through, but without a lot that would impede us. The Hudson River has a great deal of private land, and much fewer trails than in other areas, so we focused on the more direct route south. Rail lines and such helped us to cut corners.

When we reached mile 40, Justin, Dan, and Matt were all hurting pretty badly, as were Tom and I, but Tom and I plowed ahead faster when the others started to slow down. The hike was great fun until this point. Everything after forty was agony. That was in the town of Catskill.
The others told me they were throwing in the towel, having covered 47 miles. Tom and I kicked up the pace and walked a dark section of long road along quarries that was still pretty even after dark.
We continued south through Saugerties, and we kept ourselves moving. My Arizona iced tea was freezing as we walked, the bottoms of my feet were raw. The new shoes I'd brought already had one sole fall off.
I knew just about when we'd hit mile 60, and somehow I was just about spot on. I shook Tom's hand and congratulated him, we'd succeeded and reached Kingston. We continued to walk from here back to the bust station. On the way, we crossed the abandoned Ulster and Delaware Railroad, and I pointed out to Tom that that would be one of the hikes coming up, I wanted to walk it.
We completed 63.4 miles in 23.5 hours. It was quite an accomplishment, and I could not walk for a day.
Connecting these hikes was now within reach. The next section we covered started us on the Shawangunk Ridge in Minnewaska, and led us on a route to New Paltz, mostly on trails the entire time, but also utilizing a little bit of road. From New Paltz, rail and canal trails lead directly to Kingston.

In March 2014, we returned to Kingston. We hiked the abandoned Ulster and Delaware Railroad to the O&W Rail Trail, the old Port Jervis Branch we had covered further to the south. The right of way is almost entirely a trail now, which led us all the way to High Falls on the Rondhout Creek.
Only one more hike is necessary to connect where we had left off in New Paltz to the south to High Falls where we left off from the north.  This hike will take place on Sunday, June 1!

So what of that Long Path connection? It would certainly have been the better route? Well we're still working on that as well. We covered a good section over Table and Peekamoose Mountains last Summer, and prior to that I had already covered everything up to Woodland Valley to the north of there. This June, on National Trails Day, new sections of the Long Path (9.5 miles!) will open to Phoenicia, eliminating what was a road walk! To the south, another road walk section has already been changed to a dirt road, and a new trail section is to be opened very soon to eliminate the rest of it. This may end up as a Metrotrails two day group trip over the Summer.
Hope to see you all out there with us soon!

M'ke
President
Metrotrails