You begin to interest me…vaguely
Speaking of ghost towns, Friendship is one of many abandoned towns in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. It was founded around the 1860s as a cranberry farming town. Cranberry packing finally ended around 1960 or so, and at least some people were still living here into the 1970s. The cranberry bogs are still here.
Coincidentally I visited here about a week after controlled burning by the New Jersey Forest Fire Service, so it was much easier to see many of the old building foundations.
With an elevation of about 200 feet, it’s not much of a mountain, but the lakes were created over a century ago to produce ice. In 1914, you could buy 100 pounds of ice for 30 cents from the Princeton Ice Company.
Most of the trails are for hikers only, but there are paved multi-use paths around the edge of the park, a road leading up to Palmer Lake, and a single unpaved trail for bikes that crosses over the outflow for the lake.
I’m tired of the winter weather, but it does provide an opportunity to try e-biking in snow. Fresh powder is much more fun than icy rutted snow.
Yes, although not that easily. One of the selling points of folding fatbikes is their enhanced portability. Folding them potentially makes it easier to carry them in a car without a bike rack. But the ebikes are still heavy, bulky, and take up a lot of space.
On the new (2014+) Jeep Cherokees, the hatch opening is narrow, compared to similar-sized SUVs, and the cargo floor is only 36.1 inches wide between the wheelwells. Even when it’s folded in half, it’s nearly impossible to fit the Radpower Radmini in without putting down the back seats. On its side, the bike takes up most of the cargo area. The low ceiling means you risk scratching the headliner if you put it in upright, although once it’s in, you could probably squeeze a second folded e-bike alongside it. Most of the scratches on my Radmini – and all the scratches in the back of the Jeep – are from loading and unloading the bike.
The official dimensions of the 2019 Jeep Cherokee cargo area are 25.8 cubic feet behind the rear seats and 54.7 cu ft with the second row folded down. That’s less than the otherwise similar-sized Subaru Forester, which has 28.9 and 70.9 cu ft of space, respectively, behind the second row and first row seats.
As in, you are forbidden to drive a car on it, but you can bike, walk, or ride a horse on it. The former Wissahickon Turnpike, the main drag through Wissahickon Valley Park in Philadelphia, was built in the 1820s and got its current name in the 1920s when it was closed to vehicles.
On a pleasantly cool weekend morning there were a lot of people in the park, meaning we had to drive around a bit before finding a parking spot. The gravel path is wide and the people spread out so it was a leisurely 8 mile ride.
My first time biking at Whitesbog, the birthplace of the blueberry, was almost a year ago. Today was hotter and the water in Hanover Pond and the cranberry bogs looked very inviting.
As peaceful as it is, Hanover Pond is part of what has been called a “highly engineered agricultural water supply system” for growing cranberries. Whitesbog was already a large, established cranberry operation when Gaunt’s Brook was dammed in 1896 to create Hanover Pond. Water from the pond is channeled into Whitesbog’s Upper Reservoir, built around the same time.
About one mile of the twenty-mile-or-so Lawrence Hopewell Trail passes through Carson Road Woods’ hedgerows, fields, and forests. The land was once farm fields and a peach orchard; in the early twenty-first century, it was preserved as a park, saving it from development. To the north, the LHT passes through the Educational Testing Services headquarters, home of the SAT, GRE, and other standardized tests, before looping back through Rosedale Park and Mercer Meadows, a.k.a the Pole Farm, which are about three miles west of Carson Road Woods.
The Black Run Preserve is 1,300 acre tract of pine barrens in Evesham Township, New Jersey. There is a an active friends group that has developed an extensive network of multi-use and hiking only trails; recently REI has also been involved.
Frederick Law Olmstead did not want a zoo in the park he designed for the city of Trenton, but Trenton gave the people what they wanted anyway. These barns were added later and housed exotic deer and other animals into the 21st century. Recent work has restored the natural areas, but the abandoned and decaying animal barns remain in place for now.
To see what this area looks like in the summer, see Cadwalader Park Natural Area.
