Date: 2016-05-26
From: Sunrise Mntn - then Eileen's B&B!

To: Wallkill River - then Eileen's B&B!
Miles today: 20.2
Weather: overcast clouds

Last night after completing a day of slack packing, was picked up by my cousin Megan and driven to my Aunt Lynn's house where dinner was an Italian feast of lasagna, meatballs, garlic bread, salad, pie, and icecream. Two of my sisters from upstate New York (Berh and Lymn) surprised me by joining the party. A great way to end a great day.After being dropped off at the Sumrise Mountain trailhead by my cousin Eileen, slack packed 20.2 miles to where the AT crosses the Wallkill River. The trail crossed a number of both paved and gravel roads today, as well as traveling alongside / through a number of open fields, several streams, ponds, and stone fences. The changes in elevation were moderate and the trail well maintained. Time passed quickly as both the scenery and temperature were conducive to getting into and maintaining a good rhythm. There are more rocks than I had anticipated, but that is probably because PA gets so much hype on the subject.   More on rocks later!Just past the High Point State Park Headquarters there is a 220 foot tower that sits atop the highest point in NJ. There was a green-blazed trail to the tower but I did not take it.A personal highlight for me today was coming across "After",   He has volunteered his time for the last five years to help maintain the trail and had just completed some serious cutting back of thick grass along the trail with a monster "weed-whacker". "After" is also a section hiker who started the AT in 2005 and will complete the entire trail later this year. It is people like him that make the experience for the rest of us both possible and safer.   Another highlight was seeing so many stone walls that are popular in New England. A little research on them revealed the following: "WHEN WERE MOST BUILT ?New England¢s stone walls span nearly four hundred years of construction history, during which many walls have been built, rebuilt, taken apart,and rebuilt multiple times. Most walls however, accumulated as residue along fencelines during the century between 1750 and 1850 when southern, interior, and coastal New England was then a landscape of agricultural villages and family farms, carved from what had previously been a forested wilderness. The half-century between the onset of the American Revolution in 1775 and the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 was the time of most rapid construction, during which many of these earlier, haphazard walls, were rebuilt. HOW MANY WALLS ARE THERE ?In 1939 the mining engineer Oliver Bowles estimated that there were probably more than 259,000 miles of stone walls in the northeastern U.S., most of which is in New England. Many walls have since been destroyed, but probably more than half of these remain. WHY SO MANY IN NEW ENGLAND ?Traditionally, New England is considered as the six states of Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. Geologically, New England also includes the adjacent parts of New York (Long Island and the land east of the Hudson River) and adjacent parts of maritime Canada. Within this region, many walls survive because the farms were abandoned to forest, rather than converted to other uses. And they were common in the first place because the agricultural culture was broadly distributed, and required nearly wholescale deforestation (which exposed the stony subsoils to frost heaving and erosion). WHY SO FEW WALLS ELSEWHERE?The southern limit of widely distributed field stone walls ¢ Northern New Jersey has them whereas the southern part of the state does not ¢ coincides to the south with the limit of ice sheet glaciation and to the west with a transition from generally hard irregular bedrock to softer flat-lying bedrock. The transition to the north is from a tillage/pasture land use to wild lands."