Hike #1408; Fairmount to Whitehouse

Hike #1404: 4/20/21 Fairmount to Whitehouse with Ken Zaruni, Justin Gurbisz, Carolyn Gockel Gordon, Kirk Rohn, and Elizabeth Manner

This next hike would be another night hike, this time between Fairmount and Whitehouse in Hunterdon County. It would be a variation of some past stuff I'd done, with new stuff added.

I think for this one we parked on street at East Whitehouse Fire Department, where there is a trail system that goes through in back of it. We wouldn't end up doing that as part of this one though. We'd be walking to this point from back roads as planned.

We shuttled I think in my van to the starting point, which would be the Fairmount Presbyterian Church just a little to the north of the Fairmount light in Tewksbury Township, at the intersection of Beacon Light Road and Old Turnpike Road.
The old church was built in 1851 and remodeled in 1902. The original German Reformed Church on the same site was built in 1727, and was a log structure. I'm not sure how many buildings served this site prior to the current one and the original log one.

We made our way from the church, across the front lot, and own Old York Road to the cemetery on the opposite side. We entered the cemetery and climbed to the top of the hill, then continued to the southeast corner. From there, we climbed over the wall and entered the Tewksbury Township property known as Fairmount North Park.

One of the main routes of this hike would be part of what the plans called the "Tewksbury Ten Mile Trail". There is a planned ten mile loop that will pass through the township, but I'm rather amazed that the connective trail system does not utilize this piece of property. It only focuses on the loop to the south.
This property, however, makes for a good linear greenway with other parks. I had used this for a hike only once before, and only Celeste Fondaco Martin and I were on that hike.

That was such a great night hike, and she and I both agreed that everyone that missed it really missed something special. I decided to put together something that would be similar.

Once on the trails behind the cemetery, we headed through some overgrown meadows, then down into some nice woods. The trail system here is not very well marked at all, but I kind of remembered where we needed to go.
We kept to the right, and headed downhill until we came to the edge of a meadow. We followed the south side of this, then cut into more woods to descend across a small brook.

We climbed a bit more and then had to cross another wetland. There were no good trail markings, and I just had to kind of go by memory of where I had gone the previous time out here.

Fortunately, it was pretty obviously easy that we had to continue to the south. The trail comes out at a point on Route 512, Fairmount Road East, nearly across from the corner of the Tewksbury Elementary School property.

The trail joins an old woods road and emerges on the paved road. We dashed across, and then entered the corners of the baseball fields on the northeast side.

When we reached the second baseball field, we turned to the right, directly across, and reached the access road in from Fairmount Road, where there is a pretty little pond to the west. We continued on the mowed edge of the access road to the south, past the school, and then into the woods where the trail continues into the Pascale Farm Park. 

I wanted to try to go a slightly different way this time than I had gone the previous time, but that did not work out so well. We came to a trail with a sign that read "low blow", and I had considered trying to follow a loop trail to the east a bit, but that was soon pretty obvious that it was not happening. I would be lucky if I made it through any of this first section the way I did the previous time.

We came out at the north corner of a large field, where we had to go through some really super wet field edge. From there, instead of going to the center of the field the way I had done previously, we just followed the field edge to the right.

This took us up and around a fenced area off of a road called Apple Lane, and then a path cut to the left, mowed through the fields.

We passed through a line of trees to a second field, where there was a power line, and then skirted the right side of this field for a bit until another cut through to a third field. This took us out on the intersection of Hollow Brook Road and Fox Hill Road.

We headed straight to head down Fox Hill Road.
I had had some of my Freight Train Imperial Milk Stout that I'd purchased the previous weekend in Middletown NY, so I was feeling pretty good at this point.

This is an absolutely gorgeous road to walk down. It's narrow, lightly traveled, and full of pastoral settings and historic homes.
There are also more preserved properties that we didn't even begin to scratch the surface of exploring.
This time, I had a plan, and we had to stick to that. We would soon pick up part of what  was proposed as a segment of the Tewksbury Ten Mile Trail.

After a segment of fields on the right side of the road, we came to a little kiosk and the entrance to the Lance property. 

I'm not sure, but it might have been property of the politician Leonard Lance. My grandfather did a lot of work for him over the years, as well as or his father. 
Either way, the trail was sort of a woods road that passed through a wooded tract just above some of the fields to the right. We climbed slightly here and started following this route.
It was a bit confusing once we got in there. There was supposed to be a loop trail, but I couldn't figure out where it was supposed to go.

We reached some of the height of the land, and then emerged onto an open field where there was a path mowed to the right.
As I understood it, this was to be part of the new ten mile trail, so we turned to the right to continue following the field edge.
As I understand, this was the D C Klipstein tract and it was preserved or something very recently.
We continued along the edge of the field to the north side, then turned to the left, to the west.
We cut through a line of trees to a second field, and then continued out to the edge of Old Turnpike Road. We left the woods and turned to the left on the road from here to continue.

We had a long crummy walk down the road from this point. I hadn't quite decided what we were going to do to connect through to the next section yet.
The ten mile trail plan calls for a connection to the Hell Mountain Preserve, which is to the west of this point. Maps show it being accessible off of the end of Dinner Pot Road.
I figured maybe we would walk that road in from Old Turnpike Road.
Unfortunately, when we got to the road, all of it was marked private road. The adjacent Fieldview Lane was similar.

Something like this really throws a wrench into the plan.
There wasn't much choice on what to do. I had considered bushwhacking along the creek parallel with the road, but that was looking really bad.
I decided we would just have to go up Dinner Pot Road and hope for the best. If we went quickly, and then we cut over to the public preserve, hopefully we wouldn't have any issues.
We walked up past two houses, and then it was pretty quiet. We didn't end up having any other cars come by, and when we got near the top of the hill, we cut off of the road to the left into the woods.

There was a fallen tree stump on the road carved well into the form of a serpent. I was glad to get off of the road so we likely wouldn't have any problems. 

There was almost no undergrowth in the entire section of woods here. There was a bit of an ATV path at one point, but it was faint. I tried to stay away from view of the houses and followed my phone GPS to get us to the trails of the Hell Mountain Preserve. The prominent point we had to find for that was the little pond back in those woods. The trail goes around the west side of it, and if we could get to there, I knew exactly where we needed to go to get out.

We reached the pond and walked along the south berm of it, then made our way up a slope on the other side to hit one of the trails in the preserve.

We headed down hill from here, and soon beside the brook that cascades down through the preserve. We continued on the most obvious trail that followed along the brook down, then veered to the left to come out at the edge of the fields. To the right is where parking is for the preserve.

We passed through the parking area and directly across Parsonage Lot Road to enter the trails of the Hill and Dale Preserve.
I really love this NJ Conservation Foundation property, which I had at this point hiked several times before.
There are actually a lot more trails in it I have to explore, but we wouldn't get to that this time.

We entered the field edges, and then just kept to the central trail that provides or the best view to the south. We didn't have much daylight left, and we might as well enjoy it.

We followed the slope, dipped down, and headed back up again over a little creek through to the west side of the preserve. We got to the last field, and there was a tree down, but we went around it. The trail descends through these fields, then cuts onto a side hill to the right, switches back, and emerges in a meadow off of Rockaway Road near the intersection with Meadow Lane.
My route from this point was a road segment I'd never bothered to walk before, but I'd driven many times and knew it was really cool.

Rockaway Road runs closely along the pretty Rockaway Creek.
When Pottersville Road comes in on the left, a short distance past there was the site of a dam, and a very long mill race parallels the road and once served Taylor's Mill further up.
I'd always loved looking at that raceway when I was driving the road.
Taylor's Mill itsel is quite interesting as well. The historic mill along the Rockaway Creek was built in 1760.
This had been a favorite mill of mine to find when I first became interested in them when I was little.

Another of the many books my grandfather purchased for me was called Forgotten Mills of Readington. The book had a lot of information on the historic area mills, and he and I went out on weekends to find them.

Back in the 1980s when the book was published, and when I first got to see it, the mill had had a garage door placed on the front of it.

I had hiked past Taylor's Mill before in daylight, but not by way of the route we followed this time, and it had been a long time since I'd been there.

we made our way down to the mill and had a look inside.
It was a wreck compared to what it once was. All opened in the front, and amazing there was still any kind of top to it at all.
We turned right on Taylor's Mill Road from here and headed to the south.
This took us over Rt 78 on a bridge, then on the right side was a commercial building or something that Google maps labels as "chubb". 

There wass a paved path immediately along the edge of the building, and we got on and walked that.

The pathway goes around both the front and back of the building, but we followed the one that went around the front.
We emerged from the path on their access road and headed out to Halls Mill Road where we turned left, or east.
This took us out to Oldwick Road.

I don't exactly remember which route we took to get back. I think we turned left on that, and then right onto New Bromley Road.
I think this is what we did because I seem to recall pointing out the former Rockaway Valley Railroad bed, which crossed at the intersection of New Bromley Road, Cedar Road, and Mill Road.

I think my intentions for this hike were to follow Mill Road to Lamington Road to get back to Whitehouse, because it was a road I had not yet followed at the end point.
I seem to recall walking through a Pratt through truss at the end, which would suggest we went this way, because we had done Mill Road before, and that goes across the Rockaway Creek on a double pony truss.
Regardless of the way we went, it was all pleasant back road from there.
I really liked the route, because it was something very completely different.
Eventually, when the Tewksbury Ten Mile Trail is in place, it will make great fodder for more connective hikes, not just on their designated route, but through all sorts of other connections like the ones we made on this trip.
There is so much land out there, and this was just another huge example of all of the public lands we have access to, which hardly anyone will know about due to lack of signs and promotion.