Hike #636; Townsbury to Changewater

 Hike #636; Townsbury to Changewater

7/3/12 Townsbury to Changewater with "Naaron" Young, Lyz Hagenbuch, Jim DeLotto, John Spiridon, and Gregg Hudis.

The group outside of Dicolas Pizza

My next hike would be a night hike once again, this time in Warren and a bit in Hunterdon Counties. I was now nearly completely moved into my new home in Townsbury, and so I figured I'd do something that started there, but ended close enough to my work that I could get off and get to the meeting point fast.I chose to hike the Lehigh and Hudson River Railroad bed to Pequest and Buttsville, then the former Warren Railroad south to Changewater. The Meetup.com group that I had started for Metrotrails was doing quite well, though not many had been signing on for the night hikes. Regardless, we have had activity and things have been going well.

We met at a gas station near Hampton and moved cars to Changewater, then headed north to the parking area on Pequest Road in Townsbury. I ran up to my house to get shorts really quick while the others got ready in the parking lot. I then headed down hill and we began to hike the railroad bed heading west.It had been quite some time since I hiked this section of the old LHR, but it was still nice. The turbulation of the water had changed somewhat below Townsbury, where the rope swing used to be, and it was now much shallower. No swimming spots yet.We followed the right of way all the way out to beneath the Pequest Viaduct, then climbed the ATV path up to the Warren Railroad bed after taking a quck dip in the Pequest River. Lyz went in with her phone and messed it up temporarily. This first section went quite fast.After reaching the Warren RR, we followed it through Pequest WMA out to the power line crossing. It was here we were joined by Jim DeLotto, who we hadn't seen in some time. He would go on to finish the hike with us. We followed the right of way across Pequest Road where it becomes a trail, then continued through Oxford on Lower Denmark Road. John and Naaron opted not to go through Oxford Tunnel, but it had been too long since I'd been through, so away the rest of us went. Gregg had a flashlight which helped a lot. The silt inside the tunnel was messy as ever, and it made it pretty tough to get through. Gregg referred to it later as a "rite of passage", ironically, because it always used to be early on with the group.

John and Naaron never found their way back down to the tunnel on the other side. They ended up walking Rt 31 after a bushwhack. The group split up to walk roads and the rail bed both. It was getting somewhat overgrown in the sections south of the tunnel. It felt really nice to be back to doing night hikes that were so close to home, but also incredibly familiar to me because they were the beginnings of the group.In Washington, we went down to Dicola's Pizza. It was 10:30 pm, but the door was propped and we went inside to purchase much of their remaining pizza. We ate it all up out in the parking lot sitting on the parking bumpers, all back together again.

We then climbed back up to the tracks, and walked through the Washington rail yard. We had to get on Railroad Avenue because it was going to be way too dark to stay on the overgrown rail bed. We then had to walk Changewater Road back down to where we left the cars, where the trestle used to be across the Musconetcong.

When we got there, we had a very nice swim below the bridge. I rode across this bridge at least six, sometimes 8 times per week or more my entire life.

It's been really nice for me to share both the history and personal relationships to the areas where my hikes started with different members of the group, something that tends to get lost when we explore totally new areas.

This was the first night hike around my new home, and I had already begun to plan out so many more branching out from every direction, both new things and section hikes of stuff I had done in the past, now re-imagined with the lot nearest to my home being the meet point.

It seems so strange to me to be living in this place, along the Pequest River, and the old railroad bed I have been hiking my entire life. When I was little, trains still used the tracks, having been abandoned in 1986. I led my first long hike on it 12 years ago, and here I was living right by a lot where I used to take dips in the river.

My home isn't White Lake; it's unlikely that I will ever live in a place so amazing again, and most people never even get that opportunity. I can be thankful that it is public land and I can always go back, and that I made the best of my time there exploring as much as I could, and improving the trails for others. I was just given a tour of my friend, park Director John Trontis's new house, which is absolutely amazing, but even this, one of the nicest homes I've ever been in, still can't compare to what White Lake was. Nothing car.Still, I can live with the satisfaction that it was good, and now I am in a carriage house, in a different beautiful place with different opportunities. My first opportunity has been to fall in love all over again with some of the land I explored in the earliest days of Metrotrails, and to share them with friends both new and old.