Hike #1436; Port Jervis Loop

Hike #1436: 9/5/21 Port Jervis Loop with Jennifer Berndt, Jennifer Tull, Diane Reider, Justin Gurbisz, and Chris Herbig

This next hike would be a big loop around the Port Jervis NY area again. Since it was Labor Day weekend, I just expect places to be ridiculously overrun, so I needed something that'd be hidden.

I made the meeting point the old Erie Railroad turntable in the north part of town, and we would loop from there.

The route I chose was mostly the trails of the Port Jervis Watershed and Elks Brox Park, but I also planned to start with a little piece of the Delaware and Hudson Canal.
Just out from the turntable some of the canal has been dug away and obliterated mostly, and there were steps built up to where the trail goes through for that. I decided we would take that and then go up to Delaware Street or Washington Street, then head east a bit more. We walked over there, and it ended up being badly overgrown.

I took a pretty bad spill right into the mess of weeds and hurt my upper leg, which bothered me for the rest of the day.

Some of the group did stay with me, but some of the others went out and around. I told them we would just reconnect at St. Peter's Lutheran Church. There was supposedly a somewhat new trail up to the park from directly behind the church that I wanted to use for our approach.

It seemed like we ended up waiting at the church for quite a long time before the others showed up, but they did, and we were on our way.

I realized that a lot of the Port Jervis Watershed property would be perfect for us to just get away form everything, and offer some more interesting stuff as well.

We had to meander a bit in order to find this trail going up, but we soon found the triple yellow blaze that denoted the start of the Lyric's Lullabye Trail. The mountain biking groups that name these trails come up with some real oddball ones.

The trail took us rather steeply up from the start, and cut to the right a bit. The Point Peter Trail broke off from it to the left, but I wanted to be sure we did the most stuff we could do out there, so we continued to the right, on a gradual ascent up Lyric's Lullabye.

This provided us with some nice views on the way up the mountain. It headed out to a bit of a point, then switched back to the west again and rejoined the Point Peter Trail. We turned right and continued the ascent of Point Peter on the namesake trail.

Point Peter Trail climbed to intersect with the Turntable Trail, red blazed, and we turned right to reach the top of Point Peter itself. The views from the top were great and very clear.

The actual name is Elks-Charles Brox Memorial Park, named both for the land benefactor and the Elks Club that got things going for it in later years.

Once we had taken in the sight, we headed around on the road at the top, and descended from the point or a bit on the Cosmic Charlie Trail I believe. This trail wasn't on some of the original maps either, so I wanted to walk it.

We continued on this one to Reservoir Road, and then turned left along Brewers Reservoir, formerly known as Reservoir Number One.

I had already done the Dejay Downs Trail out from the north side of the Brewers Reservoir, so this time I wanted to do something a little bit different. The Tallulah Trail headed parallel with that through woods to the north, and looked like it'd be good, so we started following that.

Things got a bit confusing up ahead. Jen fell behind just a bit, and I tried to direct her onto the trail we were on, but she ended up going the wrong direction. We all turned around and headed back down the trail the way we came, and once there, we changed plans and decided to try to go back a bit more, and then turn right on the Painted Aprons Trail.

Somewhere along the way we got to a spot where there was a trail closed ahead, and we could hear the sound of people working up there. We ended up turning around and going uphill off trail a bit, and I can't remember exactly what we did, but we ended up back where we needed to be heading.

This trail was really impressive. They cut through serious blow downs, put in lots of board walk sections, crossed a power line, passed through old stone rows, and did some impressive side hill stuff with bridges over little cascading brooks. There was even a little waterfall off of the trail to the right, although we could barely see it through the leaves.

The trail crossed over several other trails through its length, which seemed to go on forever. One of the bridges looked like it was old railroad bridge grating, which was surprising they would lug back there.

I had considered going over to Mirror Lake to the east from the end of this trail we were on forever, but then decided against it and moved on toward the Deerpark Dam Lake. The Painted Aprons Trail turned out to be a whopping 2.7 miles. I think we walked the Brant Trail to the west to the Box Baum Road and turned left.

When we got toward the lake, we turned right on Delaware Trail out to the side of Deerpark Dam Lake. I went in when we found a good spot by the short a little ways in. It was so much better after cooling off.

From there, we turned back the way we came slightly, and then went right on Holography Trail beside Deerpark Dam Lake for a while.

We continued on along Holography to the road and then headed west to Starcrawf Trail.

We headed gradually uphill and through really deep woods. There are just so many trails going everywhere through all of this. We came to a four way intersection and went straight across on the Ohanzee Trail. This one took us downhill a bit and over a power line, then we continued on Scout's Honor Trail, which somewhat paralleled the power line to the west. 

We continued on the Scout's Honor Trail toward Skyline Drive, and off to the right and across the power line from it was the old nail polish factory I had gone in and explored back in 2011. 

At that time, this section of the building we were looking at was still occupied by another business, but it had now been entirely abandoned for many years. We decided we would go have a look through it.

It was loaded with graffiti, and looked like it had been abandoned longer than it actually was. Justin told us there was a giant birthday cake thing inside, and so one of the goals was to get to that. We found it and did our group photo there.

We made our way around to the part of the building that had been the lipstick factory before, and I was shocked to see that we could no longer even get inside some parts of it because it had collapsed so badly. 
I remember that time walking through the corridor of the factory which had some sort of conveyors that went up from the upper floor to the A frame of the ceiling, and there were little containers of lipstick everywhere. We each grabbed some them as souvenirs. This time, we couldn't get to the conveyors at all as they appeared to be gone, and the front half of all of those roofs had completely collapsed, and were laying on the floor of the front part of the building.

In order to even get to that section of the buildings from the ones where we entered, there was an entire section of floor that had collapsed. Other urban explorers had come through and placed items over part of the hole to walk on to get around. 

We made our way through all of the building we could, and then headed out to a secondary garage building, which was a bit more easy to pass through.

From here, I decided to reminisce a bit more, and we would end up taking the route down that we had taken up the time that we went into the factory some ten years prior. This was a sort of washed out steep road route that went down from behind the garage building and and emerged at one of the hairpin switchback turns on the Skyline Drive on the way down. 
We turned to the left on the road from that point and headed down to Route 42. From there, I knew where to go into the woods over the guide rail on the other side to get to the Delaware and Hudson Canal. There is a bit of a berm built across the water of the canal below that allows for walking down to it without having to wade at all. So we did that, and then followed the canal towpath toward Port Jervis.

We reached West Main Street, turned right, crossed the bridge over the railroad tracks, and continued down into the neighborhood there to the old Fort Decker House on the corner. The house was originally Fort Decker, built before 1760 by Dutch settler Frederick Haynes, during the French and Indian War.

Haynes left the area in 1775, and the fort was burned during a raid by Hessians and Native Americans led by Joseph Brant.

The house was rebuilt from the remains of the fort in 1793.

During construction of the Delaware and Hudson Canal a couple of blocks up the hill, the building housed engineers including John Jervis. The settlement, originally known as Peenpack, was renamed for Jervis.

Fort Decker was purchased by the Minisink Valley Historical Society for use as a museum in 1958. It is the oldest structure in the settlement. We headed from here directly to the West End Beach with some nice views of the Delaware. There is this Delaware River Heritage Trail that continues along the river and River Road from here, so we started following that downstream.

Just before we got to the highway bridge over the river, we reached the spot where there used to be a railroad bridge across.

There was once a plan to connect a Railroad from Port Jervis to East Stroudsburg, and the bridge was built over the Delaware, with the line extending as far as the present day Westfall shopping center by the 1890s.

The first rail bridge was completed 1854, and washed out in by 1872. Sections were carted back and reinstalled.

From the west, Delaware Valley Railroad extended from East Stroudsburg to Bushkill, but no connections were ever made between.

A flood washed out the bridge over the Delaware and left a locomotive stranded in Matamoras, which was eventually cut up and scrapped.

The stretch from Bushkill to Matamoras is the only stretch of the entire Delaware River Valley not to have been utilized by rail or canal at all. It's really amazing that this infrastructure was never taken through. From here, we headed up into town, under the Erie Tracks, and then to the right on Front Street to get some dinner in town along the old Erie tracks. It ended up being a great choice for this hike, and I'm keeping the Port Jervis watershed in mind for busy holidays when considering places go hike.