Lake Lookout

Lake Lookout, Wawayanda State Park (7/21/2013)

Last month, when hiking the Red Dot trail in this gorgeous park, I noticed a few trails that weren't on the NYNJTC map. A web search yielded this JORBA map, which quickly alerted me to the fact that there are plenty of unofficial trails in this park, some which are indicated as "unmaintained trails" on the latest NYNJTC North Jersey Map 116, but not all. So today we returned to do a few of those trails, parking in the pull-off on Cherry Ridge Road, a road which begins (west of Clinton Road) as a paved residential road, but quickly turns into a gully-ridden sandy mess. So be forewarned. Amazingly there were about eight trucks already there when we arrived and four more showed up as we were putting our boots on! It's a very popular starting point for mountain bikers which doesn't require the $10 entrance fee for Wawayanda.

We started by heading south on Ferber (no sign or blazes) through the chain gate, a nice woods road. At the end is a makeshift campsite (you can see it in the photos) where we encountered a large black rat snake. Just before this site is where the Splitrock trail (no signs or blazes) begins and heads into the woods, at times through rhododendrons so thick you're not sure you're on the trail. Crossing the gas pipeline cut the Split Rock continues south of it, climbing steadily eventually reaching the end of Splitrock and continuing on what appeared to be (at least according to the map) the Buddha trail (no sign or blaze). This trail then continues further than is indicated on either the NYNJTC map (as an unmaintained trail) or the JOBRA map, so we missed the right turn on to continue on Buddha. Discovering our error, we backtracked and continued west on Buddha, past a tiny little pond eventually reaching the Turkey Ridge trail (blazed in green). Eventually we headed north on the Pickle (also blazed in green) along the western bank of Lake Lookout, one of the most beautiful stretches of the hike, eating lunch at the NW tip. After lunch we continued east on the white-blazed Lookout trail, then south (just for 0.1 mile) on the red-blazed Old Coal trail before heading north on the unsigned/unblazed Mojo Swamp trail. This is another gorgeous stretch along the western bank of Cherry Lake. Eventually we reached Cherry Ridge road, which we walked back to the car.

Total distance hiked today was nearly 7 miles in about 3.5 hours. We wanted to do even more of the unofficial trails (there are at least a half dozen more in this area) but ran out of time. We shall return.

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