Hike #1040; Mt Olive to Hackettstown

Hike #1040; Mt. Olive to Hackettstown

5/25/17 Mt. Olive to Hackettstown with Jason W. Briggs, Kralc Leahcim (Lerch), Brandan Jermyn, Sue Bennett, Celeste Fondaco Martin, Rob Gearhardt, Jennifer Berndt, Justin Gurbisz, Brittany Audrey, and Dan Asnis.

Our next hike would be a point to point between Mount Olive and Hackettstown again, in much a different route than what we’d done before. We’ve done so many different variations of the area, ending up in Hackettstown, but we still have not yet exhausted all of the different routes to get there. This particular hike would be almost totally different. It included stuff even I had never done before in some cases.
We met at the Wendy’s in Hackettstown before shuttling to the Mt. Olive train station. We stopped and had some food before heading out.
Once at Mt. Olive, we started walking out old Waterloo Valley Road. Lerch and Dan were both running late, so Lerch opted to meet at the start point and run to catch us. Dan wouldn’t be able to catch us and I had him meet at Station Road where there is more parking.

Delaware Water Gap from the fire tower

I can still remember the crazy route we followed heading up Mt. Olive.
After we passed the corporate centers, I wanted to check out the abandoned house to the left that was still standing, but too many cars were going by. I didn’t want to chance a problem that early on. We continued a short distance into the woods to the intersection with the dirt road that heads up hill to the left, to some sort of Morris Co recycling center. The road is shown on google at least as Old Waterloo Road.
We didn’t go very far on it before we turned to the right on a more obscure woods road heading to the west. We followed this in through the woods for a bit, and when we came to another woods road, which leads to a clearing to the left, we went straight. We continued on this to another left turn, which took us up hill a bit more. I described to Lerch via text message each of the details of all of the turns he would need to catch us. Dan called me and told me he saw Lerch jogging along side of Waterloo Valley Road, and asked if he’d caught us yet. He hadn’t at the time of course.

View of Budd Lake from the tower

Rob had a pretty good map system on his phone, which I was surprised had some of the more obscure unofficial pathways I was looking for. We were able to determine with certainty where we were based on this, and followed the route generally heading west toward the 95 Mile Tree, also known as Budd Lake Fire Tower.

The tower sits on a knoll that is 1,182 feet above sea level. The first tower at this site was constructed in 1905, and was named so because it sat roughly at mile 95 of the old state Turnpike, present day Rt 46, which follows the shore of Budd Lake, which is New Jersey’s largest natural fresh water lake.
The current steel tower at the site was constructed in 1924 and is on the national register.
We got there well before sunset and enjoyed the lovely clouds to the west. I could see the curvature of Mount Tammany and the Kittatinny Ridge at the Delaware Water Gap to the northwest, as well as Jenny Jump Mountain before it. In the other direction, we could see Budd Lake quite clearly. It was really the perfect time to be up there for it. Not everyone came up to the top, but Justin did and hung on the outside of course, while Brittany was feeding him grapes or something.

Budd Lake tower

Dan showed up at the fire tower next while we were hanging out, and then we all headed back down the trail the way he had come. Our next leg was to turn right on the white blazed trail. The white trail makes a long loop out of Stephens State Park, and I wanted to make sure we caught the correct end of it. Fortunately, we met up with Jen prior to getting to that point, and she parked at the same place as Dan off of Station Road.
We all made the right turn on the white trail and started following it to the west.
I’d done this trail before, one time by myself, and another time with the group, but it had been a long time since I went through on any of it. I figured it was a good time to head out and see what of it I forgot from the past. It turned out there was a lot of stuff I let slip by without photographing, associated with the old farms of the area.
The trail doesn’t have a whole lot of elevation because it pretty much stays along the height of the land. our next point of interest was an old lime kiln along the left side.

Silly Justin. Lime Kilns are for Vultures.

Justin and Brittany paused to check it out, and when Justin peered in, a vulture flapped in his face to get out!
It turns out the old lime kiln was being used as a nest by the Turkey Vulture. Further inspection revealed that the kiln contained at least one little white vulture chick!
We looked at it only briefly before moving on along the trail.
Near the next trail intersection, we came to an old house site. Only the chimney and foundation were in place. I had fallen somewhat behind Lerch, and when we caught up with him, he was already perched on the old chimney out within the weeds.

Vulture chick

We took another little break here before continuing on along the white trail.
The section we followed really is pretty special because there are no road crossings for such a long way. It’s a huge expanse of public land that just goes on for miles. None of the trails are too tough, and it’s just a nice relaxing route.
At some point, Justin and Brittany fell behind, which turned into a game of messing with Justin between Lerch and Brandan. Next thing I knew, they were dragging Justin off somewhere down a side trail and leaving him like a corpse along the edge of the trail.

Chimney

We followed the white blazed trail all the way to a section of a woods road that took us gradually down hill, toward the formerly regular section of the park trails. It intersected us with the orange trail.
When I first started hiking Stephens State Park, the orange trail wasn’t even there yet. It was just the smaller loops, and the Highlands Trail was the new on the scene. In fact, the first section of the Highlands Trail I ever hiked was in Stephens State Park. We’d repeat that on this hike.
The orange trail first came into existence when Helen Maurella took over as park superintendent. I remember long before I got involved in parks that someone was telling me that they moved a Superintendent from Jenny Jump and Worthington, and that now we’d start seeing some new trails in the area. The orange trail was the first among these to sort of crop up.

Chimney

We turned left on the orange trail which went sort of up hill some more, then back down hill somewhat gradually to eventually terminate at the abandoned portion of Stephens Park Road.
Stephens Park Road used to be a through route, which provided access to the state park from Mt. Olive area. I stopped the group here to discuss our options on which way we would go for the remainder of the hike.
One choice was to go left on the old road, which would lead to the still actively used section of the road, and then we’d turn right on Mine Road back down to Hackettstown. That would put us on a regular road for a time, which didn’t sound too appealing.

Brandan finds a bike

The second choice was to head down to Stephens State Park, then cross out of the park to follow Willow Grove Street, followed by a section of paved and gravel trails to Alumni Field, then the back streets back to Wendy’s. Another variation of the Mine Road route would be to wade across the Musconetcong to those same trails where the Seber Dam used to be.
The final route, and the one we would use, would be to follow old Mine Road from the Highlands Trail, and turn away from that official route in Hackettstown, then hike some of the cemetery to Mountain Ave, just up the road from the Wendy’s.

Carrying Justin off

Once the decision was made, we headed down hill into the proper main entrance of Stephens State Park.
Stephens State Park is named for it’s donors, Marsena P. and Augustus W. Stephens. The original acreage, a riverfront location, was a gift to the State of NJ in 1937.
I had everyone hold up before getting toward the office. We quickly made our way left and past the old Victorian house on the Highlands Trail route heading west along the Musconetcong River from the main park area. We were soon back into the woods.

Messing with Justin

The trail was dark except for the ambient light coming from homes and such on the Warren County side of the river. The Highlands Trail remained on the river for a bit, then turned hard left up hill on an old woods road route.
It’s a rather brutal climb for this late in the hike, but everyone handled it alright. I regrouped everyone at the top, near what was probably an exploratory mine bit the trail skirts the rim of.
From here, the trail heads gradually back down hill to the abandoned Mine Road, which heads to the right to Hampton, and to the left to Stephens Park Road near Rt 46 in Mt. Olive.

Justin recovers

We regrouped again at the road, and then turned right to follow it gradually down hill toward Hackettstown. It becomes a regular used public road and runs into East Avenue. We crossed Route 46 at the light and continued just a bit down East Ave, then turned right into the Hackettstown Union Cemetery.
This huge cemetery is absolutely beautiful. When I was dating girls that lived in Hackettstown, I used to drive the route through the cemetery between East Ave and Mountain Ave in lieu of going through the traffic light because it was so pretty. We opted to take a route over the hill, and my plan was to reach the old through style truss bridge over the Musconetcong, where the main entrance road leads out to Mountain Avenue.

More messing with Justin

We walked through but somehow I lost my bearings. We were walking to the west and ended up rather closely parallel with East Avenue again. We had to go up and over the hill, and so I stopped following the cemetery roads and walked directly over the grass. I had to be careful not to ram my bad shin into a tomb stone, because we couldn’t really see going through there at all.
We soon reached the main entrance and the old bridge, where there are large stone columns and archway leading back out to Mountain Avenue where we turned to the left.

1910 postcard image of the Union Cemetery entrance

We walked through the walkway beside the gate and proceeded along the grassy edge of the Musconetcong River heading down stream, in a pleasant section that kept us off the road.

Union Cemetery entrance in 1954

It’s a beautiful spot through there, but we soon had to return to Mountain Avenue, but it was only a short distance back to the Wendy’s where we had parked, at the former Hackettstown Mall.

Historic image of Cemetery Bridge

I was really happy with how this one turned out; there was really negligible road walking. Most the entire hike was in very nice woods or off road routes. I could rather easily do two more almost completely different versions of this same hike using different trails.

My infected leg progress

My infection on my leg was continuing to heal rather well. I don’t recall this one hurting me that much. After the injury, I initially formed a scab that disappeared and sort of melted away with the infection, By this time the infection was receding and the areas with missing skin were starting to scab over again.
The doctors were concerned around this time that the infection was not going away fast enough, and so they strengthened my antibiotics quite a bit. There was a major concern that the infection would spread into my tibia (bone). I started out the hike with a little pain, but it soon went away for the most part. Improvement was actually fast, but seemed like an eternity, especially when I couldn’t just jump into water and go for a swim like I was used to.
We stopped at Applebees for some food at the end, which was a nice time.
Overall though, things were going quite well.