Wawayanda State Park
Terrace Pond North Trail
Date
The Bearfort Ridge is a popular destination along the NJ Highlands in Wawayanda State Park; several trails exist to get one to this scenic ridgeline, one of which is the Terrace Pond North Trail accessible off Wawayanda Turnpike in Hewitt, NJ. The New York-New Jersey Trail Conference reached out to the Rovers in 2014 to address some drainage issues near a the bottom of the trail where several seasonal streams were causing flooding, erosion and slip hazards on several section of bedrock where the trail traversed.
In 2015 the Rovers launched a series of 3 trips (2 full and 1 splinter) to address the issue by installing a series of stone staircases, stone paving, step stones and even a stone bridge. Where previously no trail definition was present, 2-ton boulders were hoisted over to make way for a reroute of the trail and add focal points along the way. The largest task was the moving of two 1-ton slabs of stone from 300 feet above using nothing but bars and picks and setting them to form a stone bridge over the larger of the seasonal streams. In the end, a total of 36 crew members along with 3 local Trail Conference volunteers contributed 1,400 hours in the construction of this project.
