Hike #982; Pennington to Ewing

Hike #982; Pennington to Ewing

11/4/16 Pennington to Ewing with James Quinn, Shane Blische, Jennifer Berndt, Jason W. Briggs, Sean TheRed Reardon, Marissa Barradale, Joe ?, Eric (not Klaus), and Bill Stephens.

Our next hike would be a point to point afternoon and night hike, this time to the south because of my temporary assignment to Washington’s Crossing State Park.
I looked at several routes around the park, and using the rail beds and canals, but I didn’t feel good about doing any of that. I was forcibly moved to the location and not sure how I felt about the situation quite yet. I felt it best to keep things positive, and it was pretty close to get over to the Taco Bell in Ewing.

Big tree in Pennington

I met some of the group there; the idea came to me while at work picking up parts from a nearby store. I went to Taco Bell for lunch, and realized it’s close proximity to the former Johnson Trolley Line, which was the subject of a hike during the snowy early part of the year. I figured we could do the route south from Lawrenceville, and I’d come up with another route to take us south to that point from around Pennington.
It worked out great. It was only a short drive to Pennington, and we walked directly from the market. As we were getting ready to go, a van got pulled over across the street. Coincidentally it turned out it was my old friend Dean Thompson from high school. Didn’t get to say hello, but found out later from a facebook post of a photo. Strange how that works out.

Former Reading RR in Pennington

We did a little history talk on the railroads of the area. The one that’s still in place, the former Reading Railroad, was part of the National Railroad put in in the late 1800s, but another line was built somewhat haphazardly first, across Rt 31 from where the later line was. The Mercer and Somerset connected the Delaware River with Millstone, intended to block the national railway from going through. It was built anyway, and the Mercer and Somerset was abandoned.
We crossed the tracks and headed to the east a bit to the college on the other side, in downtown Pennington. Bill got annoyed and turned back as soon as we got to the college because he wasn’t keeping up as well. We waited just around the corner, and when he didn’t show, Shane and I went back for him. We got him to come along and went a bit slower.

Pond in Pennington

One of the buildings at the college looked pretty old, the rest were newer. We followed the walkways through the grounds to the north for a bit, and then took a trailway along a little pond until we got to the running track on the north side of the grounds. We turned left to walk a portion of the track to head out to Burd Street. Fortunately there was a gate in the fence so we didn’t have to do any climbing.
Shane looked particularly silly with his pirate hat and pirate style shirt. It was surprising that people going by didn’t make any comments.
We followed Burd Street to the south for a ways until we got to Welling Avenue, and turned right.

Running track

The streets had some nice old houses with some pretty old trees growing along the sidewalks. Some of them had some really interesting colorful mushrooms growing out of them.
We turned right onto Pennington Road and passed a school, then soon reached the entrance to Curlis Lake Woods. This is one of many little parks in Mercer County that I found out about from the Mercer County Trails Association website. The county parks don’t appear to have any regular maps for their parks like the NJ Trails page has, but there are some really great connections. The only thing I don’t like is that they’re poorly marked and none of them to any standard that most use.

Running track

We followed the main trail into the woods, and I remembered some of the past hikes where I passed through here. It had been many years since I’d hiked in the park, but it was all just about the same.
We went straight where the route I wanted to use went to the right, because Jen was going to meet us, and I found a spot she could park at another trail access on Oak Street. From there, we turned back and then followed the main trail over a little tributary to Curlis Lake, then turned left through the woods. We skirted the hillside above the stream, then were soon along the shore of Curlis Lake itself.

Purdy tree

The lake was quite beautiful, and the sun was starting to set. It was really the perfect time to be heading through this section of the hike.
The trails are not well marked at all through this part, and others diverge from the main route, so I was concerned to get this section done by dark. We made it through from these trails to the Mercer County Farm Park, which is just an open field area. There are no markers saying how to connect this part to Rosedale Park, but fortunately I knew where to go. We turned right to skirt the fence for animals, then turned left and continued around the outside of it heading east, then north.

The path became a more recognizable farm road, and then soon we came, to my surprise, to the Lawrence Hopewell Trail.
When I first did a series of hikes on the Lawrence Hopewell Trail, it was much unfinished. On some of the hikes we walked the route as it was just staked out, without surfacing or pavement or whatever. I didn’t even know it was intended to go through this area. It went to the left toward farm buildings, and I didn’t want to be doing that in the dark. We needed to go to the right on it anyway, which was pretty much continuing to the north.
Lawrence-Hopewell Trail (LH Trail) is intended to be a twenty mile circuit between Lawrenceville, Pennington, and Hopewell area connecting many major parks including Stony Brook-Millstone Watershed Association, Delaware and Raritan Canal, Mercer Meadows, and many more.
We continued on the trail north to Federal City Road. There just as we were coming to the crossing, Red Sean and Marissa, Joe, and newcomer Eric pulled up in Sean’s car, which he calls “Sanguinius”.

Curlis Lake Woods

I looked over the maps and figured out a place for him to park and then walk to connect with us in the Mercer Meadows, and the rest of us continued on across the street into Rosedale Park.
There were several people still in the park. I had wanted to get there a little bit earlier because of the sunset over the lake, but we made the tail end of it, which was fine. The trail took us past a parking area where we stopped to use the restrooms, then continued along the causeway along the lake heading to the east. It was quite a beautiful spot to be at dusk. Beyond, we headed into the woods on the trail.

Curlis Lake

The Lawrence-Hopewell Trail is surfaced with a crushed stone aggregate, and it’s quite wide in many places. It’s basically like walking a rail trail that has a little bit of elevation change to it. It was perfect for this type of hike, and we got to it at the right time.
We continued along the trail through Rosedale Park, heading to the south until we crossed over Blackwell Road. There, we entered the Mercer Meadows, formerly known as the Pole Farm.
The Pole Farm section of Mercer Meadows was originally the location of the American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) shortwave international telecommunication station from 1929-1975. To create their facility, AT&T purchased several family farms, relocated the farmhouses, and clear-cut much of the property.

Curlis Lake

Two transmitter buildings were constructed on the southern end of the property, and the remaining fields housed the steel antenna arrays and later, many rhombic antennas. These fields were grazed by a local farmer's livestock. Farming continued on much of the property until Mercer County purchased the land in 1998. A small portion of the Pole Farm was leased to farmers, but the majority of the fields are currently native grasslands. There are a lot of trails that pass through Mercer Meadows today, and my plan was to cover some of them I had never done before. We had passed through on several hikes, but not covered nearly all of it.

Sunset at Rosedale Lake

At the first intersection, we turned to the right off of Lawrence-Hopewell Trail. Sean and his gang were coming into the park from a trail off of Federal City Road, and we agreed to follow signs heading to “Observation Tower”. We saw such a sign on our trail route, which took us through something called the Reed-Bryan Farm. We couldn’t see really anything, and had a couple of turns we could make, but fortunately continued the correct way to the west, then south along the west side of the park. There were lights and such off to the west, so we didn’t want to go too far that way. We never did find the observation tower, but at an intersection we joined our groups.

Hangin out

We walked the edges of the fields, and when I saw the surface change back to the crushed stone aggregate, I knew we were back on the Lawrence-Hopewell Trail. We followed it to the right.
Soon, we came to an historic site that had something to do with the former pole farm. There were a few pole things standing, in some sort of a pattern, though I’m not sure they’re in any authentic alignment.
We didn’t hang out there for too long. There was another restroom we made use of, then continued on the trail which made it’s way through open fields, turned right into some woods, then left to the south.

Historic view at Pole Farm

The trail soon came out to Keefe Road. It continued straight across through a swath of undeveloped land, and then over a foot bridge crossing Shipetauken Creek. We then entered Village Park.
The municipal park was crawling with people. I didn’t expect there to be anyone in the park this time of night. There was some sort of kids ball games going on, so they were everywhere.
There are several routes one can take to get across Village Park, but we chose the one to the left because it was further away from the sports people. We continued to find a pavilion where we could take a break, sort of away from where everyone else was. There were more restrooms and people could catch their breath.

Pavilion

Shane was pretty well tuckered out by this point, but we still had a ways to go.
After our break, we made our way further along the trail. It took us to the south out of Village Park and onto Bergen Street. We turned right on Bergen not even a block, then turned left onto Craven Lane. Craven is truncated in the middle, and there is a pedestrian route that connects the north and south ends of it as part of Lawrence-Hopewell Trail. We continued following the trail route on Craven to the south into the village of Lawrenceville, until we got to the right of way of the Johnson Trolley Line.

Pavilion

Officially called the “Trenton-Princeton Traction Company”, the Johnson Trolley Line was the “Fast Line” between the two cities. Ironically, we were sort of walking the line on the 115th anniversary of it’s construction, in November 1901.
It was the second trolley line to be built to Princeton. The first was mostly along roads and such, like we know trolleys to be, and had a lot of curves to it. This was a rather straight route that went mostly “cross country”, meaning not within the streets.
In it’s heyday, President Woodrow Wilson used to ride the trolley line and distribute pennies to children along the way.

The group

The trolley line remained in operation until 1940. At that time, trolley service was discontinued, and the trackage between it’s eastern terminus at Witherspoon Street in Princeton, and Lawrenceville was abandoned and torn up. The section from Lawrenceville to Trenton went into service as a standard freight rail line, which remained active until 1973.
The line was finally abandoned because of the construction of Interstate 95. There was a million dollar bridge project planned for the line to cross when 95 was going in, until they realized that only one customer was served via the line in Lawrenceville. The bridge was nixed and the line abandoned.

historic image of Johnson Trolley line in Princeton

In typical Shane form, he was able to give us the brief history of the Johnson Trolley line when we arrived at the former grade crossing of Craven Lane. Always rather amazing what he knows about lines he’d actually never even been on yet.

Historic view of Johnson Trolley Line

The Lawrence-Hopewell Trail follows the old trolley right of way to the left, but only for about a block. We left that trail and turned right at this point to follow the old trolley right of way to the southwest.
We crossed over Titus and Green Ave, and crossed over a nice little pedestrian bridge that had been built on the right of way along the way. Bill, who had been in the back of the group most of the time, powered far ahead of us in this section.
At the bridge, we came across a very cute cat sitting on the edge. I thought it’d be afraid, but it was actually quite friendly. It walked off when I approached it, but it’s tail went up pretty quickly. It was cautious, but wanted attention.
I was able to pet it pretty much right away, and even though everyone was hurrying over, it was not scared off.

Kitty friend

James, who loves cats as much as I do, said “OHHHH KITTYYYYY!” and picked the cat right up with no problem. It purred and enjoyed being pet by everyone at the little bridge.
There were houses all right there. Certainly this was someone’s cat. Since it’s a trail, and there is a good amount of space between the nearest roads, the cat probably has a pretty good home at this location, much like Puss Puss has had at Spruce Run (although now I’m told she’s got to be removed from there, another big mess). We said goodbye to the kitty and continued on the trail to the south across Pennington-Lawrenceville Road.

Kitty

We soon reached Denow Road where the rail bed is severed. We had to turn right at this point in order to get to the next section to the south of 95, what I knew would be the worst part of the hike.
Bill had gone the wrong way, to the right at first, but he soon came back and found us. We cut to the right through St. Mary’s Assisted Living property, in front of the buildings on side walks and around other buildings. We cut through part of a retention pond, then along an access road headed to the right. I did not know it at the time, but a paved trail skirts the rear of the entire building area. Both of the times I’d done this hike, I could have eliminated some of the crummy walking and done this. Maybe another time.
We took a break at a little bench under a tree, which James proceeded to climb. I double checked some maps to see the best way for us to get through to the southern end of the trolley line. It was pretty easy before, but I wanted to see if we had other options.

Tree James

We pretty much had to go the same way as in the past. We continued to the right onto Rt 206. It’s incredibly busy through here, and there really is no good walking route along it. There is no sidewalk. We had to just cross the bridge beyond the white line, which is perfectly legal but not desirable. For how nice the rest of the hike was, it wasn’t too big a problem.
We soon passed the Lawrence Township Municipal Court. I was surprised that no cops stopped us anywhere to ask what we were up to. It seems to always happen, a congregation of eclectic people wandering through wherever (and it didn’t help that one was wearing a pirate hat). No one stopped us, and we easily walked on to the Ryder University Campus, and followed the access road to the east a bit.

Buddies

Once we got to the trolley right of way, we took a break just in a bit from the road. Shane and Bill had had enough, and they rode in together, so James was hero of the night and called an Uber to pick him up. He went back and got his car, then came to pick up Shane and Bill and get them back to Bill’s car.
The rest of us continued along the right of way to the south.
It is a really nice section from there. Not all of it is paved, a lot of it is surfaced, and other sections are sort of just natural surface. The trail was paved for a bit south of Eggert Crossing Road, but once we got beyond Egger’s Crossing Village, it seemed to be all pretty much natural surface.
We crossed the Shabekunk Creek and soon emerged on 5th Street, which the trolley ran directly down. The subsurface rails can still be made out in the pavement, and the tracks are still visible and exposed in North Olden Ave. We turned right when we got there, away from the trolley line and to the Taco Bell. We got there before closing and were able to get some good sustenance.
This hike was a good forced recognition of the positive things that can come of my transfer to the south. Until this point, I had been feeling bitter about it, like I was being punished for trying to do the right thing. The truth is, the peace of the place I am now reporting to work, combined with the fact that most of the work is outdoors, may just be worth the extra hour and a half drive. No place is perfect; we will always have pros and cons. One of the pros of being in this place is the new fodder of night hikes I can share with my friends. There really is some amazing stuff that is very appropriate for the cooler weather. I will continue to make the best of it.