Wawayanda Lake (East)

Wawayanda Lake (East), Wawayanda State Park 1/1/2011)

This is a lollipop hike of my own invention using mostly trails we've never hiked before in this lovely New Jersey state park. It snowed over two feet in some areas of New Jersey less than a week ago, so I wasn't sure what to expect. Would the lots be plowed? Would the trails be tamped down? How much snow would there be up here? It turned out that the lots were very nicely plowed, as were all of the roads in the park. And while there were some parts of the trails where we found ourselves up to our ankles in snow, nearly all of it was well travelled, making snow shoes unnecessary. But we did use our awesome Kahtoolah Microspikes, which helped in the places where the snow was packed down and polished to a nice shiny slippery surface.

We parked at the Wawayanda Lake boat launch, and took the woods road (from the SE corner of the lot) south along the lake to the trail head of the Wingdam trail. We took this south to the Sitting Bear trail, making a right. We took the Sitting Bear (a relatively new trail) to its end at the Laurel trail where we made a left. We went north on on this woods road until encountering the Wingdam trail on the left (its southern terminus). Here we made a left and took the Wingdam all the way back to the car.

Total distance today was 4.2 miles in 2.5 hours.

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