The first thing we noticed was the addition of a large parking lot off Old Beach Glen Road. Last time we had to park along the woods road, just before the gate. After parking in the lot, we headed north back to Old Beach Glen Road, which we walked east to Pillar Drive. That we walked to the entrance to Old Meadows Field, hiking the unblazed trail north to the orange-blazed trail that connects Jonathan Woods with the Beaver Brook Tract in Rockaway. We took orange north all the way to Meriden Road which, amazingly, connects to the huge trail network of Splitrock Reservoir. A massive number of trails is now accessible from several parking areas in all of these areas!

We turned back at Meriden, first hiking an unblazed woods loop just east of the road, before returning to orange and taking that all the way to the red-blazed trail. We turned right and headed west, to a trail so new it's not even on the kiosk maps: the yellow trail with a black dot in the middle of the blaze. It's a little further than halfway between red and orange on the current maps. You can see it on the online map here from April, 2022. We took this trail all the way back to the car. Oh! And we saw a rather large black bear! And he saw us! But he wanted to avoid us more than we wanted to avoid him. You can see the handsome fellow in the last two rows of photos.