Hike #408; Washington/Oxford Area Loop

4/10/9 Washington/Oxford Area Loop with "DJ Ray" Cordts and Kyle Zalinsky

This next one is another that the journal was lost to the fire, and then the rewrite was lost because of facebook. Hopefully it turns up one of these days somehow. For now, I must rewrite.

This one was a night hike that sort of came about spur of the moment.
I like doing hikes after work, into the night and living life well. I'd been doing them for a while and wanted to do more, but there hadn't been so much of a demand for them.
With the arrival of so many other friends, this became more prominent.
For this one, DJ Ray and I started out in Port Colden and made our way tracing the Morris Canal fright from my house. It was once a canal boat captain's house, and was believed to have been built to house Morris Canal workers while building the canal.
We went down the street to what had once been the Nunn and Skinner Store on the canal, now apartments, and started following it over to Lock Street. The top of Lock #6 West is still visible over there on the side road, and we headed into the woods from the spur of lock street. 
It gets a little overgrown back in there on the stretch beyond Lock Street, but not too terrible. It was early Spring, so it wasn't so bad.
We reached a former weir site where a concrete bridge spanned Shabbecong Creek for the towpath, built around 1927 when the canal was abandoned. Just beyond that there is an old masonry foundation ot the left, of a building I'm not sure of its purpose.
We continued from there, and it got more overgrown. There is another aqueduct or weir site further off between Port Colden and Presidential Estates with stone abutments. It was probably a weir of some sort rather than an aqueduct. We had to climb down to the left, and then to the right on a power line clearing that leads more easily out toward Presidential Estates.
In this clearing, I noticed for the first time an old bridge abutment. I didn't know any bridge spanned the canal back there, but it must have been for a farm. This one was special because it had the wear marks from a hundred years of tow ropes against them.
We soon came out toward Presidential Drive, but instead of going into the private yard, a path leads to the right and comes out at the end of Harding Drive.
We continued along Harding out to Flower Avenue, turned left briefly, and then right on the canal again where a power line follows it out to Myrtle Ave. The canal prism is kind of visible to the left of the road there out to Rt 31.
We reached 31, crossed, and then another road across the way, called Cattelle Court on google maps, leads along the canal. There is a brick building and a wood building out along that, and a couple others, a settlement once known as Port Washington. One of the buildings was a canal office, and the other a railroad office. The Lackawanna Railroad interchanged with the Morris Canal here and had coal and ore loading facilities. The former bridge site where the canal passed beneath the railroad can be seen as the abutments of the bridge still protrude from the surface.
We made our way somehow from there out to Belvidere Avenue and across over to the JCP&L property to continue on the canal. We can skirt the fence at the edge of the property out across Kinnamin Ave, and then onto Plane Hill Road.
Morris Canal Inclined Plane #7 West is where the road is now, and the road used to be to the right a bit. 
When we got to the bottom of the hill, Plane Hill Road crosses the Pohatcong Creek on the original stone arch aqueduct built for the Morris Canal. We descended to the left to have a closer look at the stone arch, which had somewhat recently been restored and repointed.
At the bottom, there was a Canada Goose on a next. Those pests are awful, and through Hunterdon Parks I was taught to addle the eggs because the mother will continue to sit on them, but they won't hatch. If we break the eggs, she'll just lay more.
I tried scaring her off for a minute so I could get a picture of the bridge, and then a guy with a British accent across the Pohatcong Creek said "I'd leave her alone.". I tried telling him about the problems with geese and how they destroy water supplies, but he more authoritatively insisted "I'd leave her alone", more loudly. Not wanting to deal with this guy who clearly was ready to start shit, we moved on along and walked to the base of Plane Hill Road, then turned left on Bowerstown Road.
We walked Bowerstown Road to the west and I pointed out the house that had the sleeper stones for the inclined plane rails built into a wall in front, and then the remnants of where a bridge once crossed the canal a little further down. Much of Bowerstown Road is built right on the canal.
When we got to Brass Castle Road, we took the chance and walked straight across onto the DeRea tract or something, which is now public land. The canal has some nice rip rap in there and goes through a surprisingly deep cut. We headed out from there and then behind Brass Castle School, where I went to elementary school, and then across Meadow Breeze Park where some of the canal is intact.
We headed to the east from there, and I can't quite remember what we did, but I'm pretty sure we walked up Coleman Hill Road because I remember DJ Ray thinking it was such a killer, and I think we might have gone by the Tibetan Buddhist Learning Center.
Since I had it named "Washington/Oxford Loop" I think we did walk back roads into Oxford, but I'm not exactly sure what route we took!
Maybe we walked out by Oxford Lake and then came back down by way of the railroad beds. I'm not really sure.
I do know that Kyle met up with us near the end, and it was only for the last bit into Washington, and he brought more booze for us to drink!
We apparently went into an abandoned building or something, which I think must have been the ones by Warren Lumber in Washington, but the details of this one are escaping me!