Hike #1327; Woods Tavern to Hopewell

Hike #1327; Woods Tavern to Hopewell

5/28/20 Ross Tavern/Hillsborough to Hopewell with Justin Gurbisz, Professor John DiFiore, and Kirk Rohn

This next hike would be my first night hike in quite a while. The covid scare had been messing up doing a lot of this for a while, and I had been putting up either day hikes due to less time going in to work on sight, or doing day hikes instead. The previous two weeks consisted of doing long distance, multiple day trips with Jillane.

Abandoned business driveway in Woods Tavern

This time, it was looking like possibly the last cooler week night of the Spring, and there are tons of things I wanted to get done. For some reason, I had never done a group hike at the Somerset County Sourland Preserve. I’d done all of the Hunterdon and Mercer stuff pretty much, but just never bothered with Somerset because there wasn’t a good through greenway.
This time, I found a way of making it happen with minimal road walk. Further, I had not yet walked all of the former Reading line between Hopewell and where we had last gotten on it near Skillman.

Development paths!

That stretch of tracks was the only bit missing from down by Ewing all the way to Bound Brook. This was a great opportunity to knock that section out.
Unfortunately, it was a lot hotter than I’d anticipated it would be. We still muscled through it.
The obvious end point would be Hopewell at the old train station. We had been there many times at this point, so it was a good idea to finish there. As such, it was of course the meeting point.
I had never parked at the place before. There was a little inlet along the street in front of the station.
Kirk was running behind, so he would meet at the start.

Development path pond

Some kid was riding around on his bike through town here, looking at us cautiously. He would ride, stop, ride again, stop, and look back at us frequently. Justin was so freaked out by this nosey little thing that he opted to go and park on a side street instead of at the station itself.
We headed out to a part of Hillsborough known as Woods Tavern where we parked at the Shop Rite.
We didn’t waste a lot of time starting walking. We headed right through the store parking lot to the west, across Route 206, and through parking lots on the other side.

Pond along development paths

We continued through this lot parallel with Amwell Road, and then out the other side, then cut through some trees into an area of an old access road to a business.

Off trail wandering in a development...

There was no sign of a building left, just some pavement. We walked out this to Amwell Road and turned left on the sidewalk heading to the southwest.
After a short bit, we came to a paved pathway that encircled a development at the intersection with Manor Drive. We found a foot path going into the woods parallel with this and closer to a small brook, so we followed that. It took us back out to the path, which we followed around the outside of the development, and then came out at Raider Blvd.

Some off trail wandering in developments

I could see some of the paths on the google maps aerials, but there were more of them. We managed to cross and go around the outside of a nice little pond with an aerator fountain. We continued around the outside of this, and then made our way along Royce Brook a bit. There was a foot trail with a bridge across to a business on the other side at one point.
We continued along from the trail into the back side of Safe and Sound Somerset building near a fence with a dog run or something. We emerged out on Homestead Road.

Royce Brook

Directly across the street was the Hillsborough High School. There were a few kids walking around, a few adults, dog walkers, joggers, but not the regular amount of business that we would be used to this time of year with school coming to an end. The grounds were kept well and not blocked off, and my plan was to walk across them to the west. Fortunately, there were no signs or anything to keep us out, and it sort of seems to double as a municipal park with walking paths around the outsides of the fields.

Mowed path along Royce Brook

We headed to the far west side of the grounds, and then cut through some evergreen trees to emerge on Rine Road.
We turned left on Rine, and there were lots of kids playing in yards and such. It was good to see people out.
The road walk was very short out to Wallace Blvd. There, I had the choice of either walking the road out and around, or cutting directly into the woods, which was kind of a gamble. I didn’t know how we’d get through by going this way, but the aerial images looked kind of promising.

Old dam on Royce Brook

We entered the woods, and there were homes through straight ahead. We turned hard left and paralleled these homes, with the road to our left. The road moved off a bit, and we continued until we reached the Royce Brook again. We had to try to stay back away from the houses a bit, but it wasn’t really a tough bushwhack.
We turned right to follow the Royce Brook, and at times there was a bit of a mowed path along it. It appeared that there was a buried utility along the brook through this area, which one day might be made a trail.

Pond in Ann Van MIddlesworth Park

After a bit, the brook started coming closer to the homes on the north side. I didn’t want to get too close to them, so we took the first good opportunity we had to cross.

Pond in Ann Van Middlesworth Park

The north side was not as nice as the south side, because the latter had a bit of a higher bluff above the brook and very little undergrowth. It was actually a very pleasant route to be walking.
We continued on this higher ground for a bit until we came within sight of Pleasant View Road. There was a group of kids walking up it toward Ann Van Middlesworth Park, which is directly on the other side of the road. We made our way out of the woods near the corner of a park parking lot, and the kids were probably alarmed.

Beekeeping area

There were ball courts and stuff directly across, so we just headed out along the grass and into the park. Below, there was a busted up old concrete dam on a side path, which created a scenic pond with some fountains of water out in it.
The park was quite nice. We walked uphill from the dam, and past a place where they apparently do some beekeeping. We saw the group of kids again, as they had walked a long way around into the park where there were paved trails, and we had gone through the grass.

Ann Van Middlesworth Park

We continued along the waterfront to the west a bit, into the land that was once the Belle Mead military installation.
This was an active military Depot that operated from 1942 until 1958, when it was turned over to General Services Administration which then operated it until 1991. After that, much of the property was purchased by Somerset County for uses a County Park. This was the first time I’d ever walked through any of the actual park developed on the former property.

Pond in Ann Van Middlesworth Park

I had walked near to this before, on both the former Reading Railroad to the south, and the former Lehigh Valley Railroad to the north. Both lines served the facility with their own tracks, and there was a huge rail yard within the sight. I had just never walked in before.
I found out through aerial images that a rail bridge on the connection to the Lehigh Valley line, over the Royce Brook, was still in place, or at least was when they had taken the currently available photos.

Pond in Ann Van Middlesworth Park

I wanted to get a look at what remains at the site before more happens. We were pretty much too late to see any buildings. Most everything was knocked down, but Justin pointed out that we could still see the water tower out behind us, beyond the park.

Ann Van Middlesworth Park trail

There was a crushed stone path leading away from the ponds, a bit, but we walked along the grass at first. A second dam beyond the first one when we first entered the park was visible beyond but it was not holding back any water.
I walked over toward that and there was a way to walk out across it and connect to another trail on the other side, but we didn’t bother with that this time. We moved ahead, and the crushed stone trail continued in a straight line along what was the north side of the Belle Mead military depot.

Historic image at Belle Mead from Gillette on Hillsborough

As we walked along, there was another path that broke off to the right, surfaced with wood chips. It was more of a foot path, and although the straight way along the former depot property was more direct, this looked more interesting as well as shady.

Trail out of Ann Van MIddlesworth Park

We followed the trail over a little footbridge, and then down to the edge of the Royce Brook in a very pretty little area. I was glad we went that way.
There were a few joggers going by us, but not many at all. The further we went, the less we saw.
This side trail eventually came right back out to the larger crushed stone trail, which loops back on itself to return to Ann Van Middlesworth Park. We continued beyond there, where we could see out to where there were buildings in the military property.

View of Royce Brook

When the official trail ended, there were chain link fence all the way around the rest of the cleared area where tracks and buildings were, but we were able to go to the right.

Belle Mead former site

This took us right along the fence to its end where there was a hole in the fence. We could either go through or straight, but first I wanted to check out the former rail connection to the Lehigh Valley Railroad to the north.
There was no evidence of any rail grade at all any more. It was an open area, and as we walked further in the clearing where it used to be, there were lots of trees that appeared to have been recently planted. I was surprised not to see the railroad grade reused as a trail. In fact, the fill was removed!

I found double luck in the same spot at Belle Mead

Typically, we see a railroad abandoned and the fills and cuts are all left there. Often ties still in place, and black cinder dirt. Here, even the fill was removed on the approach to the bridge that carried it over the Royce Brook, and new trees planted.

Non apparent rail grade

We pushed through the young trees to reach the bridge site, and sure enough it was still there.
Although someone had burned it pretty badly, the railroad ties still spanned between concrete abutments. On either side, the fill was plowed away. It’s uncertain why this odd bridge was left in place with absolutely no purpose at all. But I was glad to see it. We all walked across it and back and looked at the odd spectacle of removed grade in either direction. After looking around, we returned the way we came to the fenced area.

Old LV grade connection

We walked around the right side of the fence and into the woods briefly, then to a utility clearing where we turned to the left.
The utility clearing closely paralleled the old military place, and was easy to walk for a while, At some point, the clearing became a paved road on the right side of it, but it was overgrown much of the time.
We mostly just followed this for a while, but we also went out to where the buildings were where we could see lots of railroad ballast rock where tracks had been.

Old Royce Brook rail bridge

As we walked, the edge of the military installation started turning to the east a bit more, and we had to continue to the south. We cut into the woods when we found a hole in another fence to the right, and then bushwhacked through with some prickly undergrowth.
There were some nice sections, and some of it I’m sure is now county park lands, but it was rather indistinct where we were. We eventually came out at the corner of a field, but I think it might have been private. Either way, it had some fencing.

Old Royce Brook rail bridge

We headed back into the woods at that point and fought through a bit more until we came to yet another more easily passable field. This took us directly out to Mountain View Road.

Old rail bridge

There is supposedly an existing greenway between Mountain View Road and the Sourland Preserve, which we would head to next, but I wasn’t sure where it all was or how clear it would be to get there. There were still “no trespassing” signs along the way that I didn’t want to have a problem with. I think the properties are a much newer acquisition to create the greenway we had intended to use. Until I’m sure about it, we chose to follow the road instead to the right, which led us out to the intersection with East Mountain Road.

Old rail bridge

I had thought to maybe cut through the woods uphill through yards to get to the Sourland Preserve trail system, but it wasn’t looking too good to get through, so we didn’t.

The LV grade, not recognizable

We walked East Mountain Road to the south for a while, past several houses. I think some of the fields to the left of us were new county land, as I recall seeing a sign saying it, but it probably would have been really messy to get through this time of year, and in colder weather, there would probably be people hunting it making it unsafe.
Maybe we’ll come back to do that another time in the future. We just stayed on the road ahead until we got to the entrance to the Sourland Preserve on the right.

The old LV connecting rail grade

The road had just recently been asphalted and there were no lines on it, but it was rather pleasant walking overall. I prefer a bit less busy though.

Yummy Tripel Horse

I got way ahead of the rest of the group on Mountain Road. I had gotten worried about finishing up the Sourland stuff before dark. These were footpaths after all, and it was important to be able to see where we were going in order to get through.
There were ways of cutting it short through that preserve, but I wanted to see all of it we could.
I waited for the others when I got to the entrance, which had a rather long driveway to where there used to be a house of some sort. We headed into the park past the kiosks and there were still a good number of people in the lot.

A nice tree at Belle Mead facility

The Sourland Preserve is a whopping four thousand acres of land, but only a fraction of it has trails in it. The Ridge Trail is five miles and makes up the largest loop in the preserve.

The former Belle Mead rail yards

My plan for this hike had been to try to follow the outermost perimeter of this preserve, except we would enter and exit the park at different locations. There is another access point a little further to the south also along Route 601, which would be our exit.
The trail started going gradually uphill, and was super wide, surprisingly. There were a lot of rocks, but they had put a lot of work into making it almost too easy. It was obvious that utility vehicles drive it and put gravel down in spots.

Some sort of old rail bed at Belle Mead

We kept to the right after entering, and the trail did get a bit more rugged as we started to climb a bit. We passed over a giant tree root mess, and there were several boardwalks.

Entrance to Sourland Preserve on newly paved road

We climbed further on, and the trail got to be a bit more rugged.
One of the interesting things I noticed on the way up was that there were ribbons tacked onto the trees.
These were not just any ribbons. They were tacked in such a way that they were showing regular and turn blazes. There was a sign that cautioned that the trails were getting reblazed, and it appears they are finally going to go with doing them to standard style.

Sourland Entrance

I consider this to be quite a big deal, because Somerset County Parks had long been completely opposed to having their trail system marked like most of the rest of the state.
When I did an interview with one of the rangers about the parks, and asked them why they don’t go with something more standard, it was insisted that they mark their trails with shapes instead of colors, and that they were not doing it any other way. It always surprises me when someone wants to keep marking a trail differently than the standard.

Trail at Sourland Preserve

Washington Valley Park was always one of the worst, but I soon learned that the Sourland Preserve was pretty bad too, because there are so many rogue trails going off in all directions. A non official trail can be just as well worn down as one that is considered to be official.
This park is very popular with “bouldering”, or rock climbing with crash pads and such. None of the rocks are all that high, and can be climbed without having to use ropes and harasses. We passed a few climbers on our way out.

Incredible Beech root system at Sourland Preserve

The Sourlands are mountains in the Piedmont geological region of New Jersey, which means “at the foothills”. These hills can be rocky at time, and I think most of the stuff there is sedimentary. We started passing more boulders as we gained elevation.

Maple Flats Trail turning off

I was seeing blazes with a single letter “C” on them, which I thought meant “Cave”, so I was checking them out. At least two had some overhanging rocks in them, but nothing that impressive. I later found out that this was for “connector trail”. Just another thing that was confusing about the trail blazing there.
When we started reaching the height of the land, in the northernmost section of the park, we reached a large area of boulders known as The Devil’s Half Acre. These are the most popular climbing areas.

Start of trail ribbon

Kirk was keeping up with me really fast as we headed up. Even though he had missed out on all of our hikes for a couple of months, it doesn’t mean he hadn’t been hiking and conditioning himself. He seemed to be faster than even when I last saw him.
We paused for a bit when we got to the really big rocks in the Devil’s Half Acre.
From there, we had to be sure of which way the trail went as it weaved back around to the south. There were so many paths turning off, it was a good thing the ribbons were up.

Devil's Half Acre

We eventually found our way to the correct trail, and were heading back to the south.
There were a lot of rocks on the trail, even when we left the Devil’s Half Acre area. It was also obvious that some crazy people regularly mountain bike over all of this. I would imagine this is among the most difficult ones to do that on.
We continued south to the intersection with the red blazed Roaring Brook Trail. I had considered taking the Ridge Trail for the rest of its loop, but Roaring Brook continues further around the perimeter.

Rock in Devil's Half Acre

When it seemed like we were doing well, we opted to just stay on Roaring Brook.
This trail weaved around quite a lot. At times, I would look back and see the others behind me around a sharp corner. I suppose the mountain bikers probably laid this one out.
We remained on this and it eventually came out along the namesake Roaring Brook, but it was not all that much of a roar. I was getting really hot and wanted to take a dip somewhere, but there was barely any deep enough water.

A boulder in the Devil's Half Acre

When I finally found a reasonable enough pool, I went down and squatted into it. It was quite a relief from all of the sweating and chaffing of my shorts.

Devil's Half Acre

It was starting to get dark by this point, and I had considered bushwhacking off of the trail system and into an adjacent quarry property that was really close by, and then following the railroad quarry spur back out of there.
We still had enough light, and the trail wasn’t too terrible, so we continued on. I had to watch pretty closely not to twist an ankle over more of the rocks that came up next.
It was like another Devil’s Half Acre at the south end of the preserve, with some interesting rock formations that included an odd tripod rock.

An odd tripod rock in the Sourland Preserve

We continued from this area and the rocks mellowed off a bit. We then made our way up slightly and then over a brook on a nice footbridge.

Devil's Half Acre, Sourland Preserve

It was getting pretty dark at this point, and just after the footbridge was the side trail that leads out of the preserve to the west.
This was an old woods road route, and it didn’t have any blazing on it. It looked well traveled enough, but not like the rest of the trails in the preserve. We figured that it would be just find because it was on the map.
We followed it downhill for a bit, through a line of trees with some stone rows. It was pleasant enough for a good amount of time. We then went over the little Cruser Brook.

Sourland Preserve

Pretty soon, we came closer to someone’s house on the right. We just pushed on past here. I got way ahead of the others again, and just wanted to be past the homes before anyone knew we were there in the dark.
Soon after a utility line crossing, the trail got insanely wet. It was grassy, but just full of water. I could see no way of avoiding it, and knew everyone was going to hate this. Everything on that trail had been really good up until that point, and then came this stinky disgusting mud. I pushed through.

Sourland Preserve

I passed the house quietly through the trees, and then came out to the gate on Route 601, Belle Mead-Blawenberg Road, and waited there for the others to come out.

Sourland Preserve

The others came through quickly the way I did, but I think Justin tried to get around through the yard or something. I saw some flashlights go on out there, and then went back off.
When Justin emerged off the trail he exclaimed “What the fuck was that shit???”.
We were all glad to be out of there.
From this point, I had two plans for where to continue. We had actually done extra mileage in the preserve, and a bit at the beginning, so I wanted to go for more direct.

Sourland Preserve

My original plan was to walk slightly north and cut through some woods and different parks to get out to the active former Reading Railroad tracks. It was rather dark to be trying that anyway.
The other option was to walk south on Belle Mead-Blawenberg Road to the quarry spur from that same railroad, and then simply follow the spur back to the mainline, and then continue on to Hopewell. We did just that, and soon reached the quarry spur where we turned to the left.

Sourland Preserve

The spur line is not all that often used. It was a more pleasant walk, but had a lot of ballast rock on it.
We soon reached the main line tracks.
These were the National Railroad built line, which knocked out the nearby Mercer and Somerset Railroad that connected Millstone with the Delaware River before 1900. It was eventually taken over by the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad. The double track right of way is more pleasant for walking at night than it is during the day I find, so it seemed like a pretty good choice.

Sourland Preserve

The problem here was, by the time we got to the tracks, we still had a lot of distance left to go and I was already exhausted. Still, we pushed on. It would end up taking us a lot longer to finish this hike than I’d imagined it would, but I think we came close to if not hit twenty miles rather than 15ish.
We soon crossed under Dutchtown-Harlingen Road, and continued through a cut to the south. It seemed like a long while, and then we crossed Belle Mead-Blawenberg Road at an angled grade. This was where we had gotten on the last time we were out, and headed north toward Manville to complete the hike.

Elephant trunk tree and rock

Everything from that point back to Hopewell was the stuff I’d been missing of this railroad line. Much of it is in a cut, so there isn’t a lot of scenery I’d be missing anyway, and there was actually plenty of ambient light from all around us.

Sourland Preserve

We continued to the southwest and went beneath Skillman Road, then crossed Hollow Road at grade, followed by Spring Hill Road. It was all pretty pleasant overall, except for the ballast rock which got annoying. We shifted from walking the ties, which sometimes were nice with less ballast, sometimes rather unbearable, and the ATV path beside the tracks which switched rom being black cinder dirt to horrible ballast. I was feeling chaffed again and more exhausted all the time.

Sourland Preserve

The next grade crossing up was Province Line Road, which made up the border between East New Jersey and West New Jersey colonies way back.
The last road we went over was Hopewell-Amwell Road. Somewhere in this area, we saw a light in the distance. I figured it must have been a train, and it was. The light was so bright, it looked like it was coming up on us for a very long time, when it was really very far away. We kept walking on the tracks for quite a bit until it got up closer to us, and then got off.

Little cave rocks in Sourland Preserve

It was cool as the train went by. I had been sweating like mad most of the walk on the tracks because it was so much hotter than anticipated.

Roots!

I couldn’t bear to even wear a shirt. As the train went by, it made this amazing wind that felt almost healing.
The train was off in pretty much no time, and we headed back toward the station.
I had turned my phone back on again to use the GPS, and I kept updating it to see if it would give me some kind of different mileage. It would give us mileages for the different roads parallel with the tracks, but the tracks through this way are absolutely the mot direct. Every road is a sharp corner out somewhere and much longer a distance.
Dogs were barking like crazy as we approached Hopewell from the close to the tracks homes.
Somerset Lane and then Railroad Place run parallel with the active railroad through part of town, and they are built on top of the original grade of the Mercer and Somerset Railroad after it was abandoned.
Soon, we reached the Hopewell Station and climbed the steep slope up to the back of it and into the parking lot. I saw I think it was Kirk walk toward us and I at first thought it was police. I felt a little dazed and too tired to think at this point.

A big tree in Sourland Preserve

Justin offered to drive me back to my car in Woods Tavern, which meant that we had to walk a couple more blocks to get to his car up the street, which fortunately was there.

Sourland Preserve

I was really happy to tie up some of the loose ends we had on this hike, and really open doors to other new ones including several other trails that will make good Winter hikes over by Woods Tavern, more of the Sourlands Mountains, which we can connect from east to west with a future point to point hike, and then the missing gap with the Reading Railroad. Maybe in the future I’ll be able to trace more of that rail line as part of night hikes into the eastern part of the state as well as into Pennsylvania.

Hopewell Station

HAM