Hawk eyes and more in Montclair

Following up on our hawk watch post a few weeks ago, Ivan and I ventured to the Montclair Hawk Watch site this past Sunday to see what was in the skies above. We'd been fortunate to see a variety of raptors (including a mature bald eagle -- extremely awesome!) at the Meadowlands Festival of Birding, so we hoped that we'd have the same luck a few miles south and a few hundred feet higher in altitude.

The Montclair Hawk Watch is New Jersey's oldest established hawk watch site, second only to Pennsylvania's Hawk Mountain in longevity nationally. Local birders started scanning for hawks from this site on the First Watchung Ridge in 1957, climbing up a rough trail from the neighborhood below. The site was eventually obtained by New Jersey Audubon and adjusted to make it more amenable to hawk watching. Today, viewers enjoy a large, flat, rock-covered platform with a sweeping view of eastern Essex, Bergen, Passaic and Hudson Counties and the New York City skyline.

It doesn't take rappelling gear to reach the summit, but the way up to the platform is a bit more than a walk in the park. After parking in a small lot for the nearby Lenape Trail, we crossed the street and made our way on an unlabeled path into the woods. Soon enough, the path rises on a series of railroad-tie-and-dirt steps leading to a steep wooden staircase built into a wide crevice between two rock faces. Once you're up a bit, you walk atop a broad, slightly angled rockface until you get to a metal staircase that Ivan described as a pool ladder. It's more substantial than that, but you get the idea.

The afternoon of our visit, a handful of other birders were already up there, chatting while keeping a keen eye out for hawks and others on the horizon. I learned that the best way to spot is to take sweeping views horizontally across the vision field through your binoculars, then moving down to the next plain and zag across the next lower field. The lulls between sightings create opportunities for conversation, and it's a friendly crowd, so it didn't take long before I felt comfortable calling out a sighting in the distance. I didn't necessarily know what I'd spotted, but others didn't take long to voice their theories until a consensus was met.

While we were there, a decent showing of birds came by, including plenty of sharp-shinned hawks, some osprey, kestrel, merlin and even a bald eagle. I always get a big kick out of watching them soar -- they look as if they're having so much fun (I know I would be if I were them), and being at a 500 foot elevation brought them so much nearer than you'd generally see them. Some of them even circled above the platform, giving us a lovely view of their undersides.

The watch season is just gearing up, and broad-winged hawks should be making their appearance in kettles (large groups) next week if experience is any indication. Other species will take up the march over the next two months, until migration is largely complete in November. Stop by and check it out for an hour or two -- I guarantee you'll gain a new respect for those large birds that we often see as just specks far up above us.

Hiking a sweet spot in the Sourland Mountains

Given how much I've knocked around central New Jersey, it's rather remarkable that it's taken me this long to get to the Sourland Mountains. Located in Somerset and Hunterdon Counties, the range seems to have gotten its name from the fact that the underlying geology can't support a decent well, leaving prospective settlers without a reliable source of water. Other sources say that the name is a corruption of the word 'sorrel,' which the Germans who settled there used to describe the reddish-brown soils in the area.

Despite the water-related drawback, the Sourlands have hosted their share of history. For one, the range played a strategic role during the Revolution, keeping the British to the west from raiding the wheat fields of Hunterdon area farmers. John Hart, one of the New Jersey delegates to the Continental Congress and a signer of the Declaration, hid in the Sourlands for an extended period of time after the British drove him off of his nearby farm. And more recently, Charles Lindbergh selected the area for a remote home for himself and his wife Anne Morrow, seeking to avoid the incessant attention of the press. Unfortunately, the home they built in Hopewell was the site of the kidnapping and death of their first child, Charles, Jr.

Today, both Somerset and Hunterdon Counties maintain open space parks in the region, and Ivan and I chose to visit the Somerset County Preserve on the Belle Meade side. The mountains seem to rise up out of nowhere in the relative flatness of the area, so it wasn't hard for us to get our bearings as we approached on US 206. There's an ample parking area at the traihead off East Mountain Road, along with a kiosk holding maps. Four trails cover about nine miles in total, the longest one rising about 400 feet in elevation as shown on the topographic map. The trail blazes aren't quite as helpful, as they go by geometric shapes rather than color, and the shapes aren't denoted on the map.

We decided to check out part of the five-mile-long ridge trail, since the map showed that it goes through an area called the Devil's Half Acre. Perhaps this is where Mother Leeds' 13th child hangs out on jaunts outside the Pinelands? The trail starts fairly level and includes a few wooden boardwalks before it gets rocky and takes on some altitude. Since it had rained recently, some of the path was muddy and the rocks could be a bit moist, but for the most part, it's a good trail. The preponderance of stones means that there's not too much underbrush encroaching, which was a bit of a relief, since we'd reached our limit on ticks at Negri-Nepote.

While the rise was continuous, it was by no means a scramble as we'd experienced at Pyramid Mountain. If you're accustomed to the rocks, it's an easy route; if not, it offers a satisfying workout. One could see why British soldiers chose not to venture through the area -- it would be a challenge to bring purloined supplies up and over the mountain, and chances would be good that you'd lose a fair bit of it along the way.

It doesn't take long to get to the boulders of the Devil's Half Acre, and the trail winds through interestingly-shaped formations with trees growing somehow through cracks and crevices. Much as you would with clouds in a blue sky, we traded ideas about what the big rocks were shaped like, and we wondered how they'd come to be there. According to the park map, the area consists of Triassic Age sedimentary and igneous rock deposited between 150 and 180 million years ago, when the region was underwater. However they got there, it's fun to walk around, through and over the rock piles. You can definitely see why Hart would have chosen to hide out in the area, if other parts of the Sourlands are as rocky as what we saw.

Once you get past the Half Acre, the trail levels out a bit, dipping and rising more gently than before. Rather than take the full route, we decided to take advantage of one of the connecting trails to truncate the trip and make our way down the mountain to the trailhead.

Gneiss try: exploring New Jersey's Stonehenge, Tripod Rock on Pyramid Mountain

You could say that this week's adventure was our rock tour, as we directed our attention away from the birds to check out some freakishly big stones, right in Morris County.

Say "Pyramid Mountain" to folks in the know, and it's inevitable that Tripod Rock will come up. True to its name, this enormous boulder is perched on three much smaller rocks near the top of the mountain. Science tells us that the Wisconsin Glacier brought it to the mountain about 18,000 years ago, and that's just how it was left. It's possible that originally there was sand and other debris under the rock, and it eroded or blew away, leaving only the stones holding it up now.

Pyramid was still wearing healthy bits of snow from the inch or few that fell a few days earlier, so we ran into that and a bit of mud along our hike. That, however, was just one thing to consider when choosing where to put your feet on the trail.

Getting to Tripod, you get a full appreciation of just how much rock that glacier pulled in its path. After a leisurely walk on a fairly even dirt path, you run into a series of scrambles across and between stones of many sizes. I was beginning to regret having brought the binoculars, as I was having visions of them scraping against the rocks as the incline steepened. About two-thirds of the way up, you're finding footholds wherever you can, and perhaps even using nearby saplings as impromptu walking canes as your feet gain purchase on the next step up. In other words, it's a good workout. All told, you're about 800 feet above sea level by the time you get there, having parked the car at about 600.

The Rock is everything they say it

Tripod Rock. To give you some scale,
that's Ivan off to the side, a few feet behind. 

is: really big, and mysterious in its own way.  It and its cousins are known as glacial erratics, and even though the geologic explanation is totally plausible, it's fun to consider other ways that huge boulder may have been deposited on its tripod. Maybe it was aliens? Maybe the natives were freakishly strong? Maybe a Monty Pythonish god-hand descended from the sky to pluck it up like a pebble and set it down again? Just as interesting, there are two much smaller rocks perched similarly just a few yards away. They're arranged in such a way that on the summer solstice, the setting sun's rays shine directly between them onto another rock directly opposite and several feet away. Depending on who you listen to, this is either a natural occurrence and a spiritual energy vortex, or created by the native Lenape tribe as a way to mark the start of summer.

Sure, Tripod offers a nice vista to view the surrounding area, but it's also a great place to get silly pictures, too. I kinda thought that it looked like a big dinosaur head as we approached, as you might be able to see in the first picture. And for those with a bit of hammishness, there's always the chance to show off the results of all those hours at the gym, or even to take on the weight of the world, if you so desire.

Once I'd had a chance to catch my breath and get some of the cosmic waves, we hiked further along the Blue trail to a huge rock formation called Lucy's Overlook, named for the woman who led the effort to save the mountain from developers. Save for the right-of-way for a 500kv electric transmission line and the towers that hold it, the landscape looked blissfully undeveloped. It's definitely a good place to sit a spell and contemplate life and the universe without interruption.

Moving on from the overlook, we took a rocky scramble to a lower elevation and started running into muddy surface again (I'm going to be so thrilled when I run into a dry track!). A few narrow board walks crossed small streams and rivulets, and soon enough, we found the next mega-stone, Bear Rock. True to its name, it's a bare rock. Standing out on its own in a clearing in the forest, it's hard to miss. A smaller yet still sizeable stone rests behind it, perhaps having split off from Bear at some point in the past 10,000 years or so. The smaller one is climbable, giving you another perspective on just how big this thing is.

Farther along the path, there are remnants of a very old house foundation. Whoever built it made ample use of the local rocks, including a large but not enormous boulder. If you look closely enough in several areas of the park, you'll see old stone walls that may have been erected as long ago as the Dutch habitation of New Jersey. Soon enough, we were taking the stepping-stone path across a stream and walking in a clearing along the transmission right of way, gaining and losing elevation in the process.

Once back to the parking lot, we found the visitors center was open for visitation. It's a nice little place to get warm and find out about the flora, fauna and geology of the property, including the sandstone and quartz conglomerate or puddingstone unique to the area. "Gneiss rock," Ivan pointed out, gesturing to a sample stone the same color and texture as Tripod Rock.

Gneiss, indeed.