Hike #1086; Hidden Lake/Franklin Twp to Bound Brook

Hike #1086; Hidden Lake/Franklin Twp to Bound Brook

11/1/17 Six Mile Run to Bound Brook with Joe Tag, Jason W. Briggs, Sue Bennett, Cupcake (Chris Kroschinski), Chris C., Dan Asnis, Shayna Michaels, Susan L Duncan, and FlipFlop Duncan

Our next trip would be a point to point night hike, this time between the Shop Rite in Bound Brook and Six Mile Run State Park, near the Hidden Lake community in Franklin Township.

The group at Six Mile Run

I’d been wanting to do this section for quite a while. It’s really a good route through Six Mile Run, and I’d done it as a day hike in the past, but knew it would lend itself well for one of the night hikes. I realized I could get to the Bound Brook Shop Rite in about a half hour from work, which was perfect for what I was trying to do. I don’t want to go much further than that in order to try to do a bit more in the daylight. It was getting dark much earlier and we’d turn the clocks back over the following weekend.

Field walking

After meeting at the Shop Rite, we shuttled with two cars to the start point, the strip mall near the intersection of Rt 27 and Schmidt Lane.
We started walking from there by going directly behind the strip mall, and then cutting through trees into an apartment complex. We turned to the left there, and then cut directly to the left past a house and out into the open ball fields of a municipal park or something. We cut directly across this, and then at the left side of the end of the field we hit the red trail into Six Mile Run State Park, where we turned right.

Six Mile Run

The trails are not super wide, but they’re really quite clear, so it makes them very good for this type of hike. While they are not totally flat, the elevation is so minimal that it’s not really tiring.
There are typically a ton of bicycles on these trails, which would make walking on them a bit difficult, but going at this time makes it much easier because there are fewer of them. The ones we did come across, however, were very courteous, and we returned the favor by moving out of their way and trying to be aware of when they were approaching us. It ended up being very pleasant.

Six Mile Run

We passed through very nice woods, crossed a power line, and weaved back and forth on the circuitous trail. This is usually the case on these mountain bike routes; they go all over the place and get a lot of mileage out of a very small area.

Old house ruin at Six Mile Run

The trails in the park are not standard blazed, which is a huge problem. I don’t like to sound like some elitist with how trails are marked, but these carsonite posts they use are few and far between, and there are far too many connecting trails to tell if you’re going the correct way or not.
Fortunately, I made the right choices for turns along the way, but I very easily could have taken a wrong one a number of times.
We passed by the ruin of an old house directly along the trail, where only the fireplace and chimney still stand, and we could hear Susie just up ahead with Zip Line.

Six Mile Run bridge

She joined us late after work to do the section remaining at Six Mile Run. Just past the old house ruin site, the trail comes close to another private house and crosses Six Mile Run on a weird old concrete farm bridge, which mountain bikers have built up further with concrete and stones so they can ride over. On the other side of the bridge from here is a very impressive board walk section that leads out to more high ground on the south side.
We were still seeing a few mountain bikers now and then, which kind of surprised me. The trail took us from here out to cross Middlebush Road, where Cupcake had just been for a while on a work project replacing the bridge.

Board walk section

The road crossing is particularly treacherous because people fly through there so badly. There really needs to be a crosswalk, but for some reason either the road or the park doesn’t want it, I can’t remember which.
We continued across the other side and past the old abandoned farm house, then made our way into more nice woods.
It didn’t seem like very long before we got to the spot where the red trail broke off to the left.
When I started hiking Six Mile Run, there was a large loop and small loop, but nothing else as far as we had come from. When JORBA (Jersey Off Road Biking Association) took over maintenance at the site, it was decided to close that section of trail from the Canal Road to the point we were at. It was probably some management decision because of traffic or something, but it’s really ridiculous because officially you can’t do a good loop there any more. They might also say it’s because of the steep slope on the creek, but that’s also ridiculous because there is so much steeper stuff in every park up north.

Dark at Blackwell Mills

Part of the problem I end up finding is that the decision makes have no common frame of reference for any other parks in the state, and there’s just way too much despotism.
We headed straight on the unofficial trail, and while Susie had planned to cut out at Jaques Lane where her car was parked, she opted to continue ahead with us and get a ride out a little bit later. The trail took us to Canal Road where we went right.
We crossed Six Mile Run on Canal Road, and continued just a bit to the north past the old building that was for a long time abandoned. It now had lights on in it and was looking good.
I guess it was some kind of park office now, but I was shocked to see the parking lot, and the fact that there were at the very least thirty cars parked there! I was thinking how most of these parks are closed at night, but there didn’t seem to be anything going on in the building, and I spotted some of the people unloading bikes! There must have been some kind of night cycling meetup going on. I’d be surprised if there was a permit for that.

View from D&R Canal in Millstone

I was even more surprised that in this area, we did not see a single park police officer go by, or go into the parking lot, or anything.
There are a lot of the officers I like and get along well with, and they tell me that even they can’t stand the way things are going. A lot of people are doing absolutely nothing I’ve been told, and clearly there’s no presence here.
We turned left on Blackwell Mills Road to the Delaware and Raritan Canal. We crossed, and then followed the towpath to the right, heading along the historic route eastbound.

Blackwell Mills canal house

Blackwell Mills was developed about 1834, and the canal house which still stands there today was built for the bridge tenders and their families.

Moonlight

We walked the eastbound section, which is more north at this point, sometimes closely parallel with canal road. There are no signs saying that this section is closed after dark, and there were actually cyclists out using it, with head lights on.
We continued out to East Millstone where we crossed over Amwell Road. I’d wanted to see where the Mercer and Somerset Railroad used to cross, but there was nothing to see when it was this dark anyway.
When we reached Amwell Road, Susie got herself a ride back to her car, and we continued straight ahead on the towpath. This next section was much more secluded.

On the towpath

It was darker and there was less ambient light from nearby roads and buildings, making this a particularly lovely stretch.
Unfortunately, Cupcake didn’t want to stay for the entire thing, and so he planned to cut out at the Manville Causeway just up ahead, the next road crossing.
I can’t get over what idiots can control things some times; I looked at google maps for the area, and they have the parking area posted as “toe path”. This was just the next frustration after seeing what was done with one of the historic canal spillways further back.

"Toe Path???"

The spillways were designed to allow water to flow over the towpath in the event of heavy rains and floods so that the canal does not wash out somewhere else. These low areas have saved the canal and are responsible for it’s longevity. They were in good shape, but tough to ride a bike over, so peole complained a lot. I personally heard complaints from people, and it’s annoying.
This is an HISTORIC STRUCTURE built this way for practicality, not so you can take your bike across it at thirty miles per hour. But people continue to complain, and they came in and re-did he causeway so it’s virtually impossible to trip.
It breaks my heart to think that some canals, like the Chesepeake and Ohio, won’t even allow a painted trail blaze along it’s route because it detracts from the historic integrity of it all. The only unblazed portion of the entire Appalachian Trail is the section where it follows that towpath. I wish that New Jersey would take that kind of stance for history.

Pillar of Fire

After Cupcake got his uber ride out, we continued through some more secluded lands, and the next point of interest was the Pillar of Fire religious property at Zaraphath.
There was something going on there, because there were lots of cars driving in, and the whole place was really well lit up with full parking lots.
We continued on along the towpath and soon came to Five Mile Lock, somewhat parallel with Weston Canal Road. There aren’t a lot of locks on the D&R Canal compared to other ones, so it’s always a kind of more interesting thing when we see t hem.

Raritan Dam

This lowering of the canal coincides with the confluence of the Millstone River, which we were parallel with, and the Raritan River. There is a dam on the Raritan just down stream, and I went down to get a closer look at the heavy cascade over the dam. There was a stone ramp down to it, which was pretty cool looking.
Although we were always rather close to Weston Canal Road, I think we must have been quite a bit lower than it from this point because it didn’t feel like we were parallel with a road so much from here until we left the canal. We continued along and passed under Interstate 287.

Raritan Dam

There was another spillway under that point as I recall. We then continued on and passed Lock #11, which is in South Bound Brook.
We continued just a little further than that to reach Queen’s Bridge over the Raritan between Bound Brook and South Bound Brook.
I didn’t know it, but the bridge had really recently just opened. It had been closed for a long time, and online resources had said that it was still closed. It was fortunate for us that it was open or I’d have had to change the entire hike.

I took a side trip into town for a bit to get a drink before heading across the bridge. The others in the group didn’t wait for me and had already crossed by the time that I got there.
Some of the group was waiting for me on the other side of Queen’s Bridge, but some of the others moved on. My plan had been to turn left on the other side of the bridge, and then follow the flood berm path along the Raritan to where it turned away, and then followed the Middle Brook. We’d then be able to follow the Middle Brook directly back to the Shop Rite where we had parked before. The distance was only slightly longer.

Rail underpass in Bound Brook

Joe told me about an historic fact I was not aware of just to the east of this point earlier in the hike, since we would be walking near it.
He asked the group what the oldest bridge in New Jersey was. My first guess was not far off, the Princeton bridge over the Stony Brook, which is actually the second oldest.
The answer was the original bridge over the Green Brook, east side of Bound Brook, for the Old Yorke Road, 1731. It is also the second oldest extant bridge in the United States, behind the Pennypack Bridge in Philadelphia built in 1697 (and we hiked over that one too).

St. Mary's Church in Bound Brook

What makes this one particularly fascinating is that the bride was mostly buried intact in 1870, and the brook was moved for the railroad construction.
The county plans on uncovering the bridge and turning it into a park of some sort, and the railroad would move over slightly. That would be quite an interesting project, and it’s amazing to hear that over one hundred thousand dollars have already gone into the preservation of the bridge.
We continued from the circle in Bound Brook to the west, and then went up Vosseler Avenue past the pretty Catholic stone church and turned left to reach the Shop Rite.
Even though the others had gone their own way, they ended up meeting at the cross street at Vosseler and finished at the same time.
We finished a bit earlier than normal because it was so easy and level. I’d love to do more hikes on that route, as I’ve now covered the entire D&R Canal route as night hike material save for the section from Bound Brook to New Brunswick, and the section between Blackwell Mills and Princeton Nurseries. Maybe I’ll get around to throwing that on the schedule for the Winter at some time.

Historic image of original Queens Bridge