Hike #1206; High Bridge Area Loop
3/14/19 High Bridge Area Loop with Jennifer Tull, Carolyn Gockel Gordon, Justin Gurbisz, Red Sean Reardon, Celeste Fondaco Martin, Dan Asnis, and Brittany Audrey
This hike would be a loop, and a variation of one I’ve done several times over the years between Spruce Run Recreation Area and High Bridge.
Path in a finger of Voorhees State Park and Willoughby Brook
I’ve always loved revisiting a lot of these places, and there are some places still that I’ve never walked, as well as others I haven’t done often, and that are somewhat different now.
For this one, my plan was to start at the large 24 hour lot on Van Syckles Road, at the beginning of Spruce Run Recreation Area, and then head through to Voorhees and then on to Ken Lockwood Gorge, followed by High Bridge. I had in the past started this with the Highlands Trail out of the main recreation area like a pig tail, but this time I opted to instead follow the route direct from the parking lot, and add other stuff into the hike.
Willoughby Brook
We simply walked from the start point along the road, crossed Rt 31, and turned slightly left to the new Mexican restaurant that just opened up where an Italian place used to be.
Along the informal path
We turned to the left out along the parking lot, and then picked up the gravel driveway to the ball fields well out behind it. We had followed this once before, and I couldn’t remember exactly how we went through.
We walked to the end of the fields, and then cut into the woods to the Willoughby Brook. This was the brook that flows out of Voorhees State Park through Buffalo Hollow.
I found a spot where we could cross it. This would be the toughest part of the entire hike, because the woods are full of multiflora rose. I didn’t worry pretty much from the start about getting my feet wet, despite the fact that I was wearing these supposed waterproof Merrils I get from Dan Trump.
Dan had worn them a few times and found them not to be truly waterproof, so he gave them to me. I like them, and they’re quite durable, but I find that they are rather heavy and make my feet sweat a lot.
CNJ culvert
After getting them wet, I found that they are somewhat waterproof, especially from the inside. I had a hell of a time getting them to drain off after that.
Memorial
Once I got to the other side of the creek, I bushwhacked a bit more and found the informal path, probably an old road, parallel with an old stone row where we were to turn left. When I saw that everyone else saw where we were going, I started following it upstream.
The Willoughby Brook passes through a wide flood plain, and has a couple of washes through which it runs. Everyone got through it pretty well though.
The informal paths leave the stone row and become more random, and lead the culvert that carried the Willoughby Brook under the former Central Railroad of New Jersey, built about 1853 in this area.
The beautiful old culvert is holding up very well for it’s age. Someone had erected some sort of a memorial and a bench on the near side of the creek at this point.
I let the group know they could go up the fill and climb over rather than walk through the culvert, because that would involve getting wet. I went right on through.
The culvert
Everyone else went over, except Dan, because he wanted to catch up with me better, and I suppose he probably thought it was pretty cool too.
I got through to the other side and climbed up, but there was another wash further on, so it put me on sort of an island.
Justin went across on a log or something, and then went up stream to find another way to cross the next flow, but couldn’t. He ended up coming back to cross at the original location with the others.
We continued on up to Poplar Road, which is also Buffalo Hollow Road in some places. It changes names based on the municipality, and is confusing because it’s also Buffalo Hollow Road going up to reach Route 31 back at the intersection where we started.
CNJ culvert
We turned to the left on the road only briefly, and then reached the Highlands Trail, where it turns up hill on a former driveway to a house that’s been demolished.
The culvert
At the house site, cement block steps lead the trail up hill and into the woods on a gradual climb through Voorhees State Park.
We followed the teal diamond blazes of Highlands Trail to the intersection with the Vista Trail. That trail had been unmaintained for a long time up until I started with Spruce Run. Then, a Student Conservation Association grant was awarded, and I proposed we have them renovate the Vista Trail and extend it up to the park’s observatory where it could close in a gap and allow for a long loop within the park with no road walking. Work was completed in one Summer.
Vista Trail
It had some pinkish blazes on pieces of carsonite initially, so I blazed the entire trail with a good pink color, which is holding up well.
We turned right on Vista Trail, passed a giant tree, through a stone row, and climbed up into a lovely stand of young birches where an informal path leads out to Observatory Road, which was historically known as Hill Acres Road when the state park was the home estate of former Governor Foster M. Voorhees. The park is named for him because he made the initial donation. Today, his former mansion is now the home to a juvenile detention center who do some work in the park.
We continued right on the Vista Trail, where a lot of the recent work took place. One spot kind of annoys me is where they put a new trail just up hill from an existing old charcoal road. It really wasn’t necessary to get the trail in place. Maybe it was over the property line, I’m not totally sure.
We headed up hill a bit more and then passed the thrones. These stone benches were part of the original Vista Trail put in by a Scout many years ago. The scout made the first one, and the second one was made by my late coworker Goerge Krapf.
The Overlook as it appeared on my 2003 hike
George passed away from cancer soon after he retired from the state parks. He had come back to work as a seasonal, but was unable to continue due to the cancer.
The overlook today
As a side note, I found out one of my next door neighbors is none other than George Krapf’s son. He’s a pretty nice guy, and we ended up talking for about an hour on a recent afternoon.
Voorhees Hill Acres Trail
He told me the sad story that his mother, George’s wife, had taken her life after George passed by ramming her car into a tree at high speed.
He told more entertaining stories of the animals that George would bring home, which included a deer, as well as a bear cub, which they kept as a pet for some time.
We continued on the Vista Trail from this point down to Observatory Road, then turned right briefly to continue on the trail on the opposite side beyond the maintenance building. The trail climbs to the peak of the road, parallel but below it the entire time.
Phallus tree on Brookside Trail
Where the trail comes back out to Observatory Road, a red trail, also new and built by a scout, goes to the camp grounds. We continued across Observatory Road and passed by the many little information kiosks of the Solar System Trail. Each one has information about each of the planets. I went out there and cleaned them all off rather recently because they were getting pretty shoddy.
I ended up having to use a big thing of burning hot soapy water in order to get it all cleaned off. Today we can still read them, but stuff coming down from the trees is making them pretty messy again.
We came out from the Solar System Trail to the overlook area off of Observatory Road.
This overlook was pretty nice up until around 2003 when I took a photo of it on another one of my hikes. We could always see Round Valley Reservoir from the vantage point, which was a pretty neat spot.
My work on the kiosks before and after
The trees at the bottom, mostly Catulpas, have now grown so tall that it completely obscures all view of Round Valley from Spring through Autumn.
More of my kiosk work
At this point, we could see the view well enough because there were no leaves.
We left this point and headed slightly across, past a Metasequoia tree, and into the end of the blue blazed Hill Acres Trail, which crosses the south section of the park.
Brookside weird spot where the creek is higher than the trail.
The first bit of the trail is only foot path and no ATV can be fit through it, so it hasn’t been cut back recently. In the past, I had gone in there and cut down the multi flora rose, but haven’t gotten a chance lately.
It got much easier when the side trail from the camp grounds came in from the left. My coworker Darryl and I had just cleared trees off of this trail earlier in the week.
We followed the route through to the intersection with the connector to Parcourse Trail, and turned hard left to follow Hill Acres to the Hoppock Grove pavilion.
The pavilion, built in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps when they had a camp at the park, was recently damaged by a fallen tree and needed some serious work.
We continued from here down past the little dam and silted in pond just below the pavilion. Darryl wants to fix this, but there’s some red tape that’s held it all up. It used to be nice.
I actually have photos from 1990 compared with how it looks currently, and it’s quite different. You can barely tell its’ the same location.
Bill Honachefsky Jr. video chatted me for a while in this area. I’d only started using this very recently, as my previous phones could not do it. It’s really cool to live this crazy technology, because it’s basically the same thing that we saw on Ninja Turtles with their communicators and such. I’m still in awe sometimes of how far things have come.
My Metrotrails post on this
We continued down hill through woods, across the Loop Road and onto the Brookside Trail past my former boss Walt’s house. He’s got a sign out there reading something about if you can read it, then you’re “in range”.
Foot bridge on Hollow Trail
We continued down hill on Brookside Trail, which becomes quite nice on a slope above the Willoughby Brook.
We followed this for some time until we got to where the Hollow Trail breaks off to the left.
This trail was originally called Wilhelm Way, named for one of the former maintenance guys there. They made them change it because he wasn’t dead yet or something, and then it became the Gold Trail, because it had a sort of gold looking yellow blaze to it. It’s still never been reblazed because they decided to blaze the Parcourse Trail yellow (which I’d have never done with another “gold” trail nearby). So it remains unfinished now for about three years.
The pond on Highlands Trail route
At the bottom of the slope, where the trail crosses Willoughby Brook, it’s a really cool oddity that the trail level is actually below the flow of the creek before the foot bridge. I’ve always found that spot fascinating.
We continued along this trail to the right, where Celeste and the other girls at work had been working on a relocation for the trail. Darryl wanted to move it to a less wet area along the brook, which would be more appropriate with the new name “Hollow Trail”.
Justin's sweat shirt
A little bit of the new trail route is finished and able to be walked parallel with the old one, so we got on that for a bit.
We entered the meadow area ahead, and then turned to the right over another foot bridge across the Willoughby Brook. This one was a former dock from Spruce Run that we’d brought down and put on the site to replace the original bridges that had collapsed.
I’ve been told that the park was fined for the initial construction of the first bridge because it was done without permits. It’s amazing how much they can be sticklers for stupid things.
Justin found a sweater
We headed up hill from here and passed the lovely little pond. We picked up the Highlands Trail route again as it passed through The Fields, which is the group picnic area at Voorhees.
We stopped under the pavilion there for a bit, and Carolyn met up with us. She parked at the high school across the street and walkd down the Loop Road to meet up with us. It was a nice little break spot at the pavilion anyway.
We soon headed out, passed the old barn and came out to Route 513 to leave the park.
The Highlands Trail follows 513 to the east a bit from here, and on the way Justin found a nice sweat shirt hung to a utility pole.
Abandoned
It was getting a little colder, and he thought to pick it up and keep it, but then he didn’t. I wore a tee shirt for most of this entire hike because it was so surprisingly warm for March.
We stopped by the little mini mart in Bunnvale, just past the church and intersection with the road to Woodglen where we got some snacks and such. As we walked up, the old guy with the long grey hair was talking to a guy in a car and passed him a wrapped paper package, in exchange for something else I couldn’t quite see. I’m fairly certain we had just witnessed a drug deal, and we just laughed about it.
Abandoned
After our break, we headed down 513 a little bit more to where the Highlands Trail enters woods again on an old driveway road. We passed by an old cabin and continued through woods to where the Highlands Trail turns off on a footpath to the left.
There, we continued straight a bit because I wanted to see the condition of the abandoned house out at the end of it.
It was a sad sight to see when we got there. Parties in there had left it a complete mess. Broken glass and garbage was strewn everywhere. When we first found this place, it was quite intact with it’s giant A-frame facade windows completely intact. There were multiple levels of them, and this time they were all busted. The place will certainly end up getting demolished at this point.
Abandoned
It’s terribly sad, because the place would have made a perfect nature center I think. I’d have loved to live back there and run guided trips out of it.
We checked everything out, and we found an old VHS yoga tape that we were going to watch at the anniversary hike party coming up (we never did get around to it though).
From there, we headed back along the old driveway, and got on the Highlands Trail down into Ken Lockwood Gorge. The descent was way easier than it had been in previous years. It used to be a hard section to keep open, so it was delightful to see it so well worn and easy to travel.
Dan had gone ahead of us on the trail, not knowing that we went to the house, but it provided him with the time to get down the sometimes step and rocky trail rather than have us wait.
Once we got all the way down to reach the “Columbia Trail”, the former Central Railroad of New Jersey’s High Bridge Branch, we turned to the left to visit the old trestle that crossed the gorge.
I can’t repeat enough times that I hate how this trail is named for the Columbia Gas line. It should never have been dubbed such, because it causes confusion with the Paulins Kill Valley Trail which actually ends in Columbia NJ only some forty minutes driving to the north. It also is a disservice to history. It should be called the High Bridge Branch Trail after the line it historically follows. It’s been hinted that it was some payoff with Hunterdon County. The minutes of the meeting are not that it was a stipulation of the deal to lease it to the county. It simply says “Hunterdon County suggested the name ‘Columbia Trail’. Naturally, Columbia Gas is excited about this”. There is no further discussion mentioned on this. I am in possession of those minutes as they were given to me when one of the planners retired.
My then and now compilation of the trestle
Once we got to the bridge, we just turned around and went back the other way again. I wanted to simply visit the site because it was so close, and it seemed like a nice little side trip.
We continued through the gorge, passed the waterfall, and crossed the bridge at Readingsburg.
As we continued from there, Lake Solitude started appearing through the trees to the left. From there, we cross a driveway before reaching the intersection with the Taylor Steelworkers Historic Greenway.
As we were approaching the driveway crossing, there is a house down in a deep hollow below the railroad cut to the right. It’s an odd house because they have to cross a foot bridge to get to it. When we were almost to the road, a car’s head lights were approaching us. I paused the group because it looked like it was going to come down the trail. It certainly turned as it if was. I went down slope briefly to get away, but then the car turned sharply into the driveway to that secluded little house. Once it was down, we continued on across the grade crossing.
Kyle's grave
When we reached the Taylor Steelworkers Historic Greenway, we turned to the left and followed the yellow blazed trail down hill to the right, and then past the Taylor Iron and Steel Company building. This is the oldest office building in the state of NJ.
Originally, it was reportedly built before the Union Ironworks came to be in 1742, and became a part of that business after that date. It was added to multiple times over the years to it’s current size, but the original stone facade is still the same.
Red Sean met up with us at this point. He parked nearby at the Huskies field and walked in to the site.
We admired the industrial site, and then turned left on the trail across the 1890 Carnegie truss bridge we had re-decked with Union Forge Heritage Association in 2009. Some of the group had never been to this site before, and they got to see the plaque with all of our names on it.
The TISCO building
The bridge project was one of the most fun volunteer projects we’d ever done. I met Bill Honachefsky through Doug Kiovsky at work with Hunterdon County and offered to help with the project then. We actually camped out at the site and got all of the old decking as well as much of the new in a single night. It was really a great time.
2009 volunteer project; photo by Shelly Janes
We literally went nuts on tearing off the old decking. We dragged it all to shore if it fell in the river, and then a flood came that night and washed it all down! It was quite crazy, but worked out in our favor! We then had the first official hike on the greenway the next day.
Redecking in 2009
The bridge is holding up really well now, and it’s been open for almost a decade at this point. It makes me think we should have some sort of ten year celebration of the greenway. The politics of High Bridge are more swayed to the favor of the group, so maybe we will.
The grand opening in 2010
We walked across the bridge, and then followed the easement granted to UFHA by Custom Alloy, who occupy some of the old Taylor-Wharton steel facility.
We headed to the left, and then visited my old buddy Kyle’s grave memorial. Kyle sadly took his own life in 2010, just before the grand opening, which rattled all of us a lot. He’d worked on the greenway project with us, and was a fixture at most all of our events from the day I first met him in Teetertown. We were each other’s wing man all of the time, and the Summer of 2009 was an insane night after night party. He was full of life more than most anyone I’ve ever met, which makes his absence that much more painful.
It was a really tough time for me. I’d taken my grandfather home from the doctor after he’d gone blind in one eye on an early August morning, and then organized a volunteer effort to create Kyle’s memorial site along the greenway. It seemed fitting because he was really into American history. He was even involved in reenactments in Union County.
We placed his ashes under the tomb stone that remains there today, and then the very next day my house in Port Colden, where I grew up, burned down and left me for dead. It was considered nothing short of a miracle that I survived. My blood oxygen level went to below sixty that night, as well as three days later in ICU when they almost lost me again. Despite some brain damage, I pulled through it and missed only one weekend hike, though I was told not to attempt such for a while.
We weaved back around and I showed everyone the ruins of the Bloomery Forge, as well as where the Solitude House was. We didn’t bother going up there this time though.
On the bridge
We headed back out past the TISCO building and over the bridge. Celeste was going to cut out early but I convinced her to stick around because it wasn’t all that much further.
We passed through town, and then stopped at a Chinese restaurant.
I was totally stuffed because I did chain saw training at work and hit up Burger King on the way back. I ate waaaay too much as I often do.
Some people got stuff, and I teased Dan by truing to hump him in the restaurant, but he’s always a good sport about all of the silliness.
Celeste gave me some sort of dumpling things they had there, which was excellent.
From here, we headed down hill through town and under the old railroad bridge. We then turned to the right under the former CNJ main line tracks at the station, and then right again on West Main Street to the north.
The next leg of the hike, the final one, was stuff I’d never done before.
I love wandering through golf courses after dark. They’re perfect for night hiking, and even though it’s not technically allowed, we’re not bothering anyway. We turned to the left on Hillcrest Lane, and then right on Sunset Drive which led to a dead end. There we could walk directly into the golf course, High Bridge Hills.
We turned left immediately on the cart path, which took us south, then east. I’d never realized that this High Bridge Hills was so aptly named. There was a lot more topography than we can see from out along the road frontage.
The cart path went down hill and across a little brook, then up the other side. At an intersection, we kept to the left and climbed out of this little gully. Rather than remain on the golf cart paths on the other side, we started heading more to the northwest, to reach the intersection of Route 31 and Cregar Road.
I pointed out some constellations along the way back, and told everyone how to find the north star using the Little Dipper. At that point, Dan pulled out a pretty cool app on his phone that identified all of the constellations while turning the phone to face them. It was pretty impressive.
We reached the northwest side, and came rather close to the club house. One more path led down into a lower area of the course where I think it’s a driving range. We cut through the woods and down a steep slope there to reach Cregar Road just before 31. I basically fell out of the woods and into the travel lane.
We turned to the right on Rt 31 from there, and soon reached the cars and Van Syckles Road to end the hike.
It was really a pretty good one overall and I was glad to mash together so much of the stuff I’d previously explored with some of the new stuff I’d wanted to see. I’ll have to do another variation of this again at some point, because there’s still so much more.
No comments:
Post a Comment