Island Beach State Park

Island Beach State Park (11/8/2010)

This is Hike #43 ("Island Beach State Park") in the book 50 Hikes in New Jersey (3rd edition). We took the day off to head south to a hike that's been on our list for some time. The weather forecast was tricky, with one online source predicting a 30% chance of rain between 9 AM and 12 PM and another predicting 55% during the same time. Well, neither was correct. For the most part, it was just very windy, but when there was precipitation, it wasn't rain ... it was very small stinging hail!

The wind whipping from the west seemed to enjoy delivering it to us! During the two hour hike it only hailed for about twenty minutes total, five minutes at the very beginning (hitting us on our right side) and about fifteen unrelenting minutes when we were on the southern tip. At this point the described hike headed west directly into the windy hail. We waited for the horizontal hail to cease for a good 10 minutes (we wanted to get a few good shots of the lighthouse, which required shooting southwest). We finally got too cold waiting, and the sight of the two of us walking west backwards, to get a closer view of Barney, must have been a site behold. Weatherwise it was quite a memorable hike, and because of this (not in spite of it) this was one of my favorites of the year.

We plan on returning one day (when it's not hailing). The southern tip is such a wonderfully beautiful spot. Also, there are several smaller nature trail hikes we want to do. We were going to do a few of them today but when we got back to the car it started raining hard. Total distance traveled was 3.5 miles in mostly soft beach sand in just under 2 hours.

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