10 Cool Things To See On New Jersey Trails With Your Dog
“If your dog is fat,” the old saying goes, “you aren’t getting enough exercise.” But walking the dog need not be just about a little exercise. Here are 10 cool things you can new Jersey landscapes see in New Jersey while out walking the dog.
GLACIAL ERRATICS
Pyramid Mountain is best known for its glacial erratics – boulders that were sprinkled across the landscape by retreating ice sheets from the last Ice Age. The most famous is Tripod Rock, a boulder various estimated at between 150 and 200 tons, that is suspended heroically off the ground by three smaller stones. Nearby notable neighbors include two massive monoliths: Whale Head Rock and Bear Rock, that with a little imagination does resemble a recumbent bear. A short detour from the summit of the Tourne leads to a gravity defying glacial erratic called Nouse Cradle Balancing Rock. Clarence DeCamp named it in 1897 when he discovered a mouse nest in a nook in the rock. The 54-ton boulder is balanced on two points of a ledge rock and a hidden wedge stone.
PREHISTORIC BONES
At the Ghost Lake parking lot on Shades of Death Road in Jenny Jump Forest you can take your dog along a short, rocky trail along the lakeshore to a steep rocky slope. Here you will find a cave known as Faery Hole. The cave room has a flat floor and enough headroom for a Great Dane to stand on two legs. The opening was excavated in the 1930s by state archeologist Dorothy Cross who recovered thousands of mammal bones, including the tooth of a long-extinct giant beaver. In Haddonfield, in the north end of the borough, is the heavily wooded Pennypacker Park where dinosaur bones were discovered in 1838 in a steep ravine carved by the Cooper River. When a full excavation was initiated by William Parker Foulke in 1858 nearly 50 bones of a plant-eating, duck-billed dinosaur were discovered. Haddonfield was suddenly famous as the site of the most complete dinosaur skeleton ever found. A small memorial marks the spot where Hadrosaurus Foulkii was unearthed at the end of Maple Street.
CAPE MAY DIAMONDS
The beach next door to Higbee Beach WMA is the similarly dog-friendly Sunset Beach, famous for its Cape May Diamonds. The “diamonds” are actually pieces of quartz crystals that have been eroded from the Upper Delaware River and been polished by a 200-mile journey of churning and jostling that can last a millennium or two. The stones, that can be cut and faceted to do a passable imitation of a diamond, are found in abundance here because the tidal flow bounces off a unique concrete ship that rests offshore. The Atlantus was built to transport soldiers during steel-short World War I. The reinforced-concrete ship worked but the recovery of post-war steel supplies made her obsolete and the Atlantus was being towed to Cape May to serve as a ferry slip when an accident dumped her on a sand bar where she remains today.
REVOLUTIONARY WAR RELICS