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Hurricane Irene passed right over New Jersey less than a week ago, causing extensive damage in many of the forests of northern NJ and NY. While Harriman got badly
hit, the Catskills was particularly damaged, as well as the Adirondacks. Furthermore, lots of roads were damaged or still flooded as of today, so instead of heading
north, we decided to head south. Sourlands Mountain Preserve is a beautiful preserve that we've hiked twice in the past (in 2005 and again in 2008). After my friend Andy told
me that a brand new red trail in the Roaring Rocks Boulders area (which had no blazed trails the last time we visited) was his new favorite, I decided it deserved another
visit.
Following this very good map, we formed a circuit hitting the following numbered posts in this order: 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, up to Roaring Rocks Boulders where we took the brand new red trail north to 4, and then trail C to 3, then 2, 1 and finally back to the parking area. There were several major blow-downs, huge trees that crashed right across the trail, but all were navigable. There were also loads of broken braches, some as big as large trees themselves. Amazingly, nearly all of them were nicely dragged off the trail. It's clear the park service (and possibly volunteers), were very busy over the past few days. Every boardwalk we traversed was still quite solid. And the brooks were quite dry, which is not surprising given the fact that it hasn't rained a single drop (thankfully) since the hurricane ended on Sunday morning. Total distance hiked today was 5.2 miles in 3 hours. (Click on the thumbnail to bring up a bigger image in a pop-up window)
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Photographs and content copyright © Dan Balogh Web design by Dan Balogh |