D & R Canal: Blackwells Mills to Griggstown Causeway

D & R Canal State Park, Blackwells Mills to Griggstown Causeway (New Year's Day, 2013)

Happy New Year! It snowed during the past week (again) so instead of heading into the hills we thought we'd give the snow some time to melt a bit: trudging along in 8-12" of snow is hard! So we headed south again to "bag" another section of the D & R Canal. Today we parked at Blackwells Mills (we hiked to Blackwells Mills from East Millstone on Christmas). We took the beautiful towpath 3.5 miles south to Griggstown Causeway before turning around and heading back. The majority of this stretch has a very isolated feel, given that there are no roads paralleling the path for much of the trek.

Both endpoints have beautiful canal houses still intact, with a bridge tender's tiny station just across the bridge from the house. In fact, the areas at both endpoints are so similar that it's a bit difficult to tell the difference between them. Surely they had a cookie-cutter plan for these canal bridge points. The bridge tender's house at Griggstown Causeway still has a telegraph inside (though it's probably not the original). There are also additional buildings at Griggstown Causeway, the site of a former mill. It's a very interesting area. Finally, there's a canoe and kayak rental place just behind the canal house with very reasonable rates, for those interested in doing a bit of paddling on the very still water. The dock is right there, convenientally located behind the canal house.

I have said in the past that the canal is a birder's paradise. This was true today as well, though the biggest bird, a great blue heron, was a bit too fast for my picture-taking agility. I got one very blurry photo of him booking it out of there the moment he saw us approaching. On the way back, the sky darkened with literally hundreds of vultures. We have never seen so many vultures in one place at one time. I got one photo of just a fraction of the sky. I have no idea what they were up to. They weren't really circling over a given spot but rather floating around en masse from one place to another.

Total distance covered was over 7 miles in about 3 hours.

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