Wild New Jersey: Nature Adventures in the Garden State
My dad and I walked up the mountain trail on a chilly autumn morning. Laurel and wild cherry and rhododendron cloaked the narrow boulder -- strewn path, limiting our visibility to just a few yards ahead. We were the first hikers out that morning -- but we were not alone. That was apparent right away. Fresh claw marks scarred the fallen tree trunks lining the trail; the parallel incisions on the logs left wood shavings in the dirt. Patties of bear scat greeted us every few minutes, the highbush blueberries still apparent in the droppings. With each bend in the trail, our anticipation grew.
Will this be the day? Will we finally encounter a block bear in the wild?
Step after step, my eyes focused on the trail. A sudden grip on my shoulder brought me to a halt. My dad stared ahead, eyes alight. No more than thirty yards before me, an adult black bear and cub foraged along the edge of the trail, noses to the ground. They were oblivious to us. We stared in amazement as another cub came into view from the gently wooded slope arching up to the right -- followed by the massive father bear, who had to be pushing 500 pounds.
The bear family foraged for insects and grubs, drifting in and out of our lines of vision. The wind must have shifted, for the mother bear looked up alertly. With no signal recognizable to us, the cubs understood. Mama bear and both cubs trotted downslope away from the trail.
Hmm ... where, exactly, is Papa bear?
We silently went through mental checklists of what to do in case of a bear encounter -- realizing at the worst possible moment, as we later shared, just how much of our assumed knowledge was contradictory. Shout loudly or remain quiet? Stand aggressively or withdraw meekly? Avoid eye contact or give it a friendly wink?
The answer appeared in the form of the heaving black shoulders of Papa bear, who lumbered across the trail toward his family. Unlike the others, he was in no hurry. This was his forest. We were only visiting.
During those moments of watching the family of bears, I felt that I could have been in any great American wilderness. And I was. I was in New Jersey.
Years have passed since that black bear encounter, one of my first wild New Jersey experiences. So my dad and I decide to return to the bears of Wawayanda State Park in Sussex County. We awake before the early May-dawn can thaw the frost from the grassy tufts peeking out from boulders and slabs of gneiss bedrock. The sun first appears as rays glancing off the cliffs before us on the Appalachian Trail, which stretches 2,178 miles, all the way from Georgia to Maine. First conceived by Benton MacKaye in 1921, the "A.T." was completed sixteen years later. Up to four million people hike some portion of the trail each year, from casual walkers enjoying a brief jaunt in one of the many national and state parks along the path, to the hardy souls who devote months upon months to hiking its entirety.
Wawayanda s twenty-mile stretch of the Appalachian Trail is as dramatic as it gets. Towering above the farmlands and the grassy meadows to our north, Wawayanda Mountain rises so abruptly that it seems to be an eternal symbol of the geologic cataclysms that shot it skyward from deep in the belly of the earth. It seems to say that no matter how much New Jersey changes, it will not. Wawayanda Mountain will always stand above the fray.
We ascend. The initial stroll through a valley floor pine forest gives way to steep switchbacks. The trail practically doubles back on itself time and time again, rising slightly higher along the cliff with each bend. My feet do not touch trail bottom for steps at a time, as we scramble from boulder to boulder. Crevices appear and disappear between massive slabs of rock, mini-caves offering dark respite for wildlife. Lichens, ferns, and moss provide the primordial cover.
If there is a better place than Wawayanda Mountain to launch a year of exploring New Jersey's wildest places, I am not aware of it. Between my deep breaths on this mountain climb, the terrain and vistas bring to mind Yellowstone National Park. Out there, rolling valleys of meadows and forest fill the vast bowl of an ancient volcano, alpine mountains rising around its edges. Here in Wawayanda, the mountain overlook offers a magnificent view of rolling farmlands to the north. The Highlands mountain chain staggers westward, each triangular form backed by another, then another. This being New Jersey ski country in winter, white ski trails wind down the closest peak's wooded face like maple syrup pouring down a stack of flapjacks.
From the mountaintop, the Appalachian Trail clambers up and down the mountains heading east. In the middle of this rugged forest, a thousand feet above civilization, a most unlikely discovery awaits: an antique black mailbox, mounted decades ago, with its red flag up.
That last entry is a crucial one. Six thousand volunteers a year from thirty different trail clubs maintain the length of the Appalachian Trail. In Wawayanda's portion, volunteers from the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference come out every spring and fall to clear fallen trees after the winter storms and cut back overgrown brush at the end of summer. Their handiwork built the stone steps and carved out the switchbacks on some of the trail's trickiest segments.
"Hikers are often surprised about how wild and remote the New Jersey section is versus their impression of the state -- especially if they're not from New Jersey," says John Fletcher of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. "They're often pleasantly surprised at just how much wild land there is -- and what a remote feeling they get there."
Land of the Black Bear
This New Jersey segment of the Appalachian Trail is special for another reason. Just as the grizzly rules Yellowstone, Wawayanda is the land of the black bear. In the decade since we spied that bear family crossing a Wawayanda trail, my dad has never seen another. There would be no shame in that if it were, say, the 1960s.
"Fifty years ago, you probably would have been hard-pressed to encounter a black bear," says Fletcher. "Now New Jersey is one of the most populous areas for black bear on the whole Appalachian Trail."
Black bears were considered to be vermin in New Jersey and across the country until the 1950s. Deforestation had drastically reduced the bear population long before that, and bear expert Kelcey Burguess of the state Division of Fish and Wildlife estimates there were fewer than 100 black bears remaining in New Jersey by 1970.
New Jersey, of course, didn't renew bear hunting in the 1970s. Three decades later, 1,660 black bears roamed S80 square miles in the state- surveyed area alone -- 3 bears per square mile. The bear population exploded at exactly the same time that human sprawl pushed ever westward and northward from the urban centers. New Jersey finally renewed the bear hunt in 2003, but daily headlines and emotional rallies trans-formed it into a political football. Two years later, the state canceled the hunt.
Long-time New Jersey Fish and Game Council member and Rutgers wildlife ecologist Len Wolgast is concerned, like many, about where the bears' uncontrolled increase will lead.
"There's around 700 cubs born each year, and probably around 100 killed by cars or killed by State Game. There have been six minor attacks," says Wolgast. "We have the highest black bear density in the country, in the same slate as the highest human density."
The numbers are startling, and it's hard to deny the potential trouble that might arise from humans and black bears sharing space in northern New Jersey. At the same time, there is something inherently magical about seeing a black bear in the wild. This marvelous creature evokes so many different images, from the fierce protector of its young to the popular icon of the cuddly teddy bear.
Millipedes and Woodpeckers
On our long-awaited return to Wawayanda, my dad and I hope to encounter New Jersey's largest land mammal once again -- from a safe remove, of course. It has been a long time for us, and a long time for the bears. We hike through mountain laurel and rhododendron groves, along mountainside trails with expansive views over ravines and cliffside caves. We pass swamps dotted with witch hazel and black huckleberry, as well as skunk cabbage and berries -- some of the black bear's favorite foods. The timing seems right, the foot traffic is sparse, and the weather is comfortable. Everything is in place but the bears. No sightings, not even a pile of scat to give us hope.
Fortunately, Wawayanda is plenty wild even without a black bear in sight. The bounty of other wildlife soon overcomes any disappointment. I turn over a few logs and leaves to uncover large millipedes, their size dwarfing the red-backed salamanders found in the same leaf litter. The moist soil of the mixed pine and oak forest is ideal for many ground-dwelling species like salamanders, shrews, and moles. Near a waterfall on another trail, a pileated woodpecker crosses a clearing not far ahead of me, my first sighting of this gorgeous, large bird, which displays a thick tuft of red feathers on its crown. In person, it is far more majestic than its cartoon image, Woody Woodpecker.
We soon cross a trail of stones edging a glacial lake in a remote corner of the park. This lake sits nearly two feet above the water flowing past our walking stones, held back by an expertly engineered dam of beaver-cut sticks. On the far shore, a beaver dam rises up behind some dabbling ducks, serving as headquarters and sentry post for the entire operation of hard-working beavers. There are more glacial lakes here in the Highlands than anywhere else on the eastern seaboard. Glacial lakes like this one, formed by the ice left behind as a glacier retreated northward, offer ideal habitat for migrating waterfowl, river otter, and a wide variety of amphibians and reptiles.
As for the bears, they will have to wait. If we cannot find them again in Wawayanda, surely that perfect encounter awaits elsewhere in New Jersey.
On warm June night in 2006, Shaun Fitzgerald, a Vernon Township police officer, and his wife awoke to unearthly wails from their Glenwood backyard. They opened the door to find a mountain lion and its cub.
"We went outside to see what was making loud, piercing shrieks in the backyard," Christine Fitzgerald told ABC News. "Fifteen feet away from us, we saw a large blond female mountain lion along with a cub that had just killed one mother cat and two stray cats."
The encounter held one especially puzzling detail. Cougars -- also called mountain lions, pumas, panthers, and catamounts -- were extirpated from New Jersey in the 1800s. In fact, cougars were wiped out of the entire United States east of the Mississippi River. Concerned about the risks to livestock from this powerful predator, New Jersey and other states put a bounty on cougars. Overhunting and deforestation likely eliminated cougars from the Northeast by 1900.
Nonetheless, sporadic reports of cougar sightings in New Jersey persisted throughout the early 2000s, as researcher Chris Spatz from the Eastern Cougar Foundation knew all too well. When he follows up on most reports, the perpetrator nearly always is a misidentified bobcat or housecat. Photographs that appear credible have no reference to show scale or turn out to have been taken in another state entirely.
As a boy, I spent endless hours swimming in the ocean, exploring the suburban woods, and hiking with my dad, Bill Wheeler, who cherished time outdoors away from the office. Fortunately, the outdoorsman in him rubbed off plenty on me.
Strangely enough, it was living and working in New York City that really shifted my passions back to nature.