Best Walking in New Jersey

#1. Mount Tammany

  
The Kittatinny Ridge (meaning “Endless Mountain” in the Lenape Native American language) comes to an abrupt, spectacular end at Mount Tammany. The 1,527-foot ridge plunges 1,200 feet into the Delaware…

#3. Beaver Brook Trail

  
This rugged, 6.2-mile-out-and-back hike ascends to a beaver colony. While the animals are nocturnal, daytime visitors will be rewarded with proof of the beavers’ engineering feats. The hike also climb…

#5. Great Falls of the Passaic River

  
Two hundred million years ago lava surged out onto the surface of the earth in eastern New Jersey, burying Piedmont sandstone and tropical jungles. That forty-story-high magma wall cooled into erosion…

#7. Parvin State Park

  
Where habitats collide, botanical and biological diversity rules. In Parvin State Park, northern and southern ecosystems meet in a preserve that lies just below the Mason-Dixon Line. Here oak-pine upl…

#9. Wyanoke High Point

  
Tramping clubs organized and blazed formal trails to favorite spots. In 1912, the New York chapter of the Appalachian Mountain Club laid claim to the Wyanokie Highlands, a jumble of small peaks twenty…

#11. The Palisades, Bombay Hook

  
Visitors to Palisade picnic groves in 1910 could shut their eyes and enjoy a symphony of immigrant voices. Scents of boiled cabbage, sauerbraten, and falafel floated on summer air beside the Hudson. T…

#13. Rancocas Nature Center of the New Jersey Audubon Society

  
State parks are spread thin along the overdeveloped Inner Coastal Plain. But one struggling park, Rancocas, has allied itself with the nonprofit New Jersey Audubon Society. When budget cuts in the 197…

#15. Cape May Point State Park

  
A late-summer cold front blasts out of the northwest, and in the dark of night all across the northern U.S. and Canada, birds take flight. By September up to 12 million per evening appear on airport r…

#17. Holmdel Park and Longstreet Farm

  
Sitting astride a cuesta in Monmouth County is Holmdel Park, the site of Longstreet Farm. Established in 1775 as a subsistence farm growing all its own produce, it had by 1890 shifted to the harvestin…

#19. Monument Trail

  
The tough Shawangunk conglomerate that forms the backbone of the Kittatinny Ridge was born in the deposition of sand and gravel by streams 440 million years ago. These formations compressed, folded, f…