2/22/9 Phillipsburg/Easton Area; Morgan Hill-Hillcrest/Phillipsburg with Jillane Becker, Shelly Janes, Kyle Zalinsky, Amanda Rosanblatt, Cory Salvseen, "DJ Ray" Cordts, Jim Delotto, Sharon Harbisoun, Jim "Mr. Buckett" Mathews,
This is yet another one where the original journal entry is gone. I had first lost them to the fire, re-wrote the, and then facebook lost the larger ones, so they had to be rewritten.
One would think that after years of explorng Phillipsburg and Easton, we'd have nothing more to do. The truth is, it has now been well over twenty years and there is still a ton to do, and we continue to find more.
Hike #400 is a milestone. I'd done this 400 times, covering high mileage on a planned route. Hike #300 had been a fantastic time with a party at Tea Biscuit's house at the start, so 400 seemed appropriate to do the same.
I came up with a crazy route where the party would technically be the start of the hike. We would walk right from there.
It started out pretty good, but I had a problem with some controlled substances going around, and being a somewhat recent government employee was pretty paranoid of being around it. The complete lack of disregard of absolutely everyone around me when I said I'd prefer not to be around it...not that no one could do it, was just too much. I nearly left and didn't come back and slept much of the night in the parking lot of Crivellaro's restaurant in my car.
I came back very early in the morning and hung out before the hike was to start, and everyone was coming there.
The route I put together would be right off of Tea Biscuit's back yard, and then down toward Easton trying to pick up the former Glendon Branch from the Lehigh Valley Railroad.
We bushwhacked pretty directly and came out onto Morvale Road.
There was some sort of dam ruin in the creek below before reaching the road.
We then turned left and headed across some corn fields to pick up a portion of the old Glendon Branch, which goes through some of the field. We then cut across I guess it was a municipal park property and then onto Berger Road. There's a very old home on a corner there just after passing beneath Rt 78 that had recently suffered a fire and was in really rough shape. I thought for sure it'd be demolished, but it's still standing in a shambles over a decade later.
We turned left on Island Park Road for a bit, because my plan was to get down to the Lehigh Canal towpath where the towpath bridge used to cross to Island Park, a long lost amusement park on an island in the Lehigh River. At this time, the cables were still spanning the river, although the bridge decking was long gone.
We headed down across the tracks, and then to the mule bridge site. We then headed to the right on the towpath into Hugh Moore Park.
We continued on the towpath and canal past the guard lock and lock house, and made our way to the Old Glendon Bridge, the through truss span over the Lehigh River that would later be made part of the D&L Trail.
Once on the other side, we used some roads I guess it was to get uphill, and then made our way to the former Easton and Northern Railroad bed, out to the old Dixie Cup Factory beyond 25th Street. This entire area is now a trail, but only a portion of it south of Freemansburg Ave was at the time. It was otherwise just an ATV path that led out across Northampton Street.
We continued on the rail bed across Northampton and then out to Wood Avenue. From that point, it went into the old pigment factory property. We of course couldn't go into the facility to follow the rail bed like I'd done a few years before, so we skirted it to the south side. This took us along a path, down some steps, past a vacant building and a few other ruins. After passing some giant tanks and such, we reached the grade of the Lehigh Valley Railroad where it continued down to a terminus on the Bushkill Creek. This took us past some old loading area and onto 13th Street at the former Simon Silk Mill.
DeLotto and Sharon cut out early at some point and the rest of us continued along the old railroad bed heading to the east. This took us out to Bushkill Creek where we crossed the open ties of a deck girder bridge over the creek.
On the other side, the rail bed went into a scrap yard that had scrap art made by a man named Keifer and my old buddy Randy Melick. This included an Atlas made of I beams and bicycle parts, a horse shoe sculpture, and a giant rooster.
We got back to the railroad bed after a bend in the creek and road, and then reached the underpass for Rt 22. There, we headed steeply uphill and onto the campus of Lafayette College. At the top of the bridge we reached the road, and then cut to the right behind a building to the Fisher Campus, which is set up like an amphitheater.
From Fisher, we made our way through the campuses that were most near the edge of the cliffs which afforded us views of the Easton area. We then reached the war memorial that overlooks the Easton Circle, with the steep steps that make their way down to Bushkill Drive. We headed down there.
We reached the bottom and headed out to the Rt 22 bridge over the Delaware River. There are pedestrian lanes on both sides, and the north side affords views of "Little Water Gap" as well as Getter's Island. This is one of those "haunted places" people love because of the back story.
Getter's Island is so named for a murderer who was hanged there after murdering his pregnant wife, and was hanged twice when the first attempt failed. The site was also where the boiler exploded on the only attempt at running steam boat service on the upper Delaware failed. Several people died here as well.
I related the story to the group as we moved on across the bridge.
On the other side, we descended, then headed along North Main Street on what would later become Warren Highlands Trail. We stopped along the way at a little restaurant to warm up.
We continued on River Road out of town, and then I took everyone to the giant concrete pipe that goes beneath the JT Baker Chemical place, which leads out to the Delaware River. Everyone always loves that.
We walked along the Delaware from there to the base of Marble Hill, then made our way across the Bel Del Railroad tracks and up the future Warren Highlands Trail and mine trail to the Fulmer Iron Mine, which was probably worked in the 1880s. The ice formations on this occasion were quite amazing.
From the mine, we went up to the right of it, and over past a larger pit mine before reaching the cleared property of the future Phillipsburg High School. It sat unused for a while, and I'd walked through several times, but this time it had chain link fencing around it. We couldn't get through easily at all, so we just skirted the fencing heading back down toward Phillipsburg. I recall we must have taken back streets out to the Burger King to finish this one.
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