Hike #980; Harmony to Washington

Hike #980; Harmony to Washington

10/27/16 Harmony to Washington with John M. Kosar, Annika Krystyna, and James Quinn

This next hike would be a point to point I had put off a few times before, but even on this one it was not as it was intended to be unfortunately.
I wanted to scout out the future route of the Warren Highlands Trail, where we’d been having several issues, and finish in Washington after a Morris Canal section.

Van Nest Hoff Vanetta farmstead

After meeting at Krauszers in Washington, we headed to the start point at the Harmony Municipal Building, and walked to the north on Rt 519 to the Van Nest Hoff Vanetta homestead, which had been restored with state and county funds. The trail is to pass through there.
We walked by it and followed the field edges to the north, until we got to the next bit of fields owned by state park service. It was raining heavily from the start, which made it sort of a drag, and I was wearing shores with holes through the bottoms. It was quite cold.
We turned up through the fields, and followed the right side. There was no longer a farm access lane, and we had to walk between field edge and through the line of corn stalks as we made our way gradually up hill.
There’d have been a good view if it weren’t so messy, but this time we couldn’t really enjoy it.
When we got to the top of the field, we cut in to follow some of the old woods road system that would take us up to the fields off of Ridge Road. Unfortunately, these were pretty badly overgrown and we had to do an arduous bushwhack.

Overgrown woods road

Some of it was horribly bad. We eventually hit a better woods road, which we followed to the left, back down hill slightly, to another woods road that took us back up hill. In retrospect, the woods road we should have reached would have been this one in the center of the field that leads more clearly to the top of the hillside.
Once we were on that, it was much nicer. The route has a nice view to the west from it, but again the clouds and rain were too much to appreciate it.
The woods road continued up hill generally to the southeast. It was rather steep, but overall easy. We came to the intersection with another woods road, then switched back to the right to follow the hill up hill just a bit more, and then hit a left turn into a field.
From here, we turned left again and walked along the field and through a line of trees. On the other side, we turned right and headed down hill on the farm access road, north along the edge of the next field. At the intersection at the bottom, we went left along more field, then right along an access road that passes an old Spring House and out to Ridge Road.

Future Warren Highlands Trail

This was where we planned for Warren Highlands Trail to cross, but also where hikers had been harassed by ATV riders, and where our kiosk that we had installed was knocked into the ground by someone with a pickup truck. It was never reinstalled and the spot has remained looking like it was no longer state park land ever since.
I wanted to continue across on the woods roads to the top of Ragged Ridge on the other side, but it was so rainy and cloudy we’d never see anything, and we would not likely be able to find our way through in the dark down to the road on public land. We stopped and thought through our options here.
For a moment, I considered going onward to Merrill Creek and making the hike a loop, but that would involve more road walking too. Then I considered making it just the point to point to Washington, using more back roads instead of the exact planned Warren Highlands Trail route. I decided that the latter was least complicated, and we’d still get in our mileage. We turned left from here to follow Ridge Road west.
We stayed on Ridge Road until we reached Fiddlers Elbow Road and turned right. This road used to have a crazy sharp bend in it that had been straightened at some point, but the road still bore the historic name. We continued steeply up this, which was kind of tough, and then got to Harmony Brass Castle Road at the top. We turned left here, and walked the road west to Demeter Road I believe it was. We cut through the cemetery on the corner, and then continued to Buckhorn Drive.
I had done this on hikes in the past, when I was scouting for a future trail route very early on. Some of what we walked from here was my regular planned route, but some of it could now easily change.
When we got to the end of Buckhorn and turned right on Spring Lane, we found that it had been paved for much of the way. Spring Lane was the only significant through road that remained unpaved in Washington Township, and now the most beautiful part of it was freshly paved over. It looked like it had just been done. I had taken John for a ride on it not very long ago and it was still dirt.
Without the dirt surface road, I have little interest in continuing to use that road as Warren Highlands Trail. I’d now like to explore other routes for it instead. I’ll be soon looking over the maps to see what might work, but with my temporary transfer to Washington’s Crossing, timing is not working out for getting anything done on the trail.
We walked Spring Lane to Harmony Brass Castle again, and instead of going into Roaring Rock Park, I changed the route due to the rain and we instead walked across onto Angen Road. We passed Angen Pond area and continued over the hill, then down the road steeply toward Brass Castle. We turned left at the bottom, then right to cut into Meadow Breeze Park and the Morris Canal Greenway.
Once in the park, we walked the old canal towpath to the east. At the end of the park, we got on the paved trails that went around the outside, then along more field edges to connect with Brass Castle Elementary School. We turned right at the end of that, then continued to meet James. Together, we headed out to Brass Castle Road, turned left, then turned right on the former canal route that goes toward Bowerstown on Bowerstown Road.
Bowerstown was a former foundry site back in the canal days, and in more recent years it was Board of Education and Project Excel.
I pointed out where the original Bowerstown Road went over the canal, with one remaining abutment to the bridge. I then pointed out the house where the front wall was made from the former sleeper stones to Inclined Plane #7 West. The old inclined plane is now Plane Hill Road, and we turned right to go up hill on that.
Across from the intersection with Kinnamin Avenue, we cut to the right side of the JCP&L facility driveway. This was also the old canal route. We passed Westgate Apartments on our right, and then emerged a block from Belvidere Avenue.
Back in the canal days, this was the segregated black part of Washington. I always like to showcase the fact that some canal related stuff was the beginning of the end of segregation, because even in the old canal days, even African Americans could be Captain of a canal boat.
Such was the case of James Campbell, an African American canal man who owned a house in Washington. I brought the group by Captian Campbell’s house, which had been well restored. It is planned to become a museum, and it was one of the projects funded by the county when I was part of the Municipal and Charitable Trust Fund Grant Commission.
We continued from here onto Belvidere Avenue, then turned onto other back streets cloely parallel with the railroad tracks until we found a path where we could climb up to them.
We followed the tracks to the east, to the former bridge site at Jackson Avenue, and we climbed down.

Delectable slop

Once we got down, the road leads just a short distance to Rt 57 at the Krauszer’s Food store, across from the parking lot where we had met.
We actually got done in pretty good time, so we decided to go across the street to the Washington Diner for some delectable slop. I don’t mean this at all to sound derogatory; Washington Diner in my opinion is the best diner in the state of NJ. They have low prices and probably the largest servings one would ever see. I just like food that looks like slop. The sloppier the better.
Annika treated us to the food, and we had a nice time resting and warming up after the crazy wet walk.
Despite the fact that hardly anyone was crazy enough to walk hours in the crummy weather, I was very glad to be out. I really needed the release of stress that I got through doing this hike. The way things have been cannot go on forever I keep telling myself, and I need to keep doing the “normal” things that give me comfort or I’ll likely go insane.