Mountainside Park

Mountainside Park, Pequannock Township, NJ (1/22/2012)

Not only were temperatures around 10 degrees F in Morris County this morning, but we got at least a half a foot of snow yesterday. Conclusion: time to go hiking! We first hiked this park in October, 2010 when no official map was available for this rugged, mountainous area. At that time we followed a sketchy hike description on LocalHikes.com. Since then two hikes have been posted on the NYNJTC for this area, as well as a wonderful free map put together by the NYNJTC.

We followed the Hike of the Week for 1/4/2012, which uses the blue trail north to the viewpoint, and then returns on the yellow south back to the car. There is a fair amount of climbing along the way, and the snow made it even more strenuous. But we didn't see another soul (in fact the parking area wasn't yet plowed, so we parked on the street) and yet we were surrounded by life. We saw fresh animals tracks everywhere: birds, deer, rabbits, coyotes and/or fox, but no bears (they're probably hibernating). We were the first to hike in this park since the snow. The only prints besides ours were those of the critters, hundreds of critters.

Total distance hiked today was 3.2 miles in approximately 2.5 hours with lots of climbing and lots of snow!

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