Return of the MAGICICADA

If anyone lives in the Northern Jersey area and you haven't been to Ramapo Reservation, I have one piece of advice for you: put on your hiking shoes and get your booty there asap. It's got 19.7 miles of hiking trails with an array of things I personally love: waterfalls, ponds, abandoned buildings, and outlooks. With 11 different marked trails there's enough variation for all types of hikers from the beginner to the more advanced. Additionally, if 3,313 acres aren't enough for you, trails connect to Ringwood State Park for even more outdoor fun.

Recently, I had to pleasure of going on a short hike of approximately 2 hours with one of my best hiking buds: Tyger. Unfortunately, this was another time when I lacked my fancy camera. So please bear with the camera phone pictures. The trailhead features a lovely warning about copperheads and timber rattlers. Somehow in my years of going there, never happened to see this sign as I always took a different entrance. It kind of reminded me of my time at Kakiat Park. 

Snakessss

A Bergen County Hybrid

I have a problem with Pascack Brook County Park. It's not a problem I've had before and it is honestly more an issue with retrospect than anything else. This park confuses me. It's 79 acres with ball fields, playgrounds, and fishing "ponds" (you know, the kind that requires that cute little fountain to aerate it). Inside it also boasts a "suburban oasis" that hosts a variety of wildlife in its riparian habitat. Wild celebrities include the dark-eyed junco,  downy woodpecker, great blue heron, painted turtle, box turtle, & wild rabbit among others. So my confusion lies in what this park wants to be. Does it want to be a standard county park (kind of like Wood Dale, which I mentioned in an early entry) or does it want to be a nature preserve?

Parking was super easy, as to be expected with a county park like this. What did give me a little shock is how much pervious pavement there is. The parking areas and paths have pavers with holes filled with gravel to allow water to infiltrate the ground. So awesome and a bit more environmentally friendly than standard paving.

Look at that paving

The Secret Forest

When I was 16, a boy I had a crush on friend of mine took me to this "secret forest." It had no name and no labels proclaiming it was a park of any sort. Besides the fact that I got to spend time with this friend (which was exciting in its own way), it was wonderfully intriguing to me that so much land (or so it seemed) was hidden away at the end of a pretty unremarkable road only for the privileged few to discover. He led me over a small bridge that went over a creek and explained to me that there used to be houses back here but they were knocked down. If we looked hard enough we'd be able to find the remnants of them. Traces of humanity in "natural" places have always fascinated me and still still do to this day. I was giddy at the thought of stumbling onto whatever might be left behind-- a foundation, rusting cars, whatever...though we never did really look.

Small and Mundane

Visiting Wood Dale County Park in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, was a trip down memory lane. It is the suburbanite's classic park: water feature, walking paths, a playground for the kiddies, a picnic grove, and if you cross a little cement bridge you can access an off-leash dog park and tennis courts. I took the two family dogs to this little park yesterday, even though that wasn't my original intention. I wanted to go to "Pascack Brook County Park," but google navigation took me to some neighborhood with a dead end. Classic. Honestly, this has happened to me about 3 other times before where the navigation would take me to some dead-end street and direct me to off road through the woods. I might have a jeep, but I'm not that ballsy.