2018 - Hike 10 - March 11th - Sourland Mountain Preserve (Somerset County park - NJ)

White Square Trail (plot from Alltrails.com)

Posted by Chris 3/13/18

Basics:

Length -7.5 miles by the time we finished with detours and minor misroutings

Elevation gain - 600-700 feet

Nearest city - Hillsborough, NJ
Difficulty - Absolutely every foot of trail other than the parking lot was covered in either snow, ice or mud.  This took what would have been a moderate hike and made it difficult.  The Alltrails plot we used called it Moderate.

The Day:
After a speedy breakfast at a bagel place along NJ-31 we had an easy drive to the parking lot for the park.  This 5000 acre park has been on my to-do list for some time and it did not disappoint. The scenery and wilderness feel both surpass what I would expect a few miles from my very industrial and suburban workplace.  When the hike started the snow was all frozen solid and the first mile of the trail was mostly crusty ice.  As the day and hike wore on the snow became gentler and less icy as we gained altitude.  The middle half of the hike at least was almost all pleasant white packed (sometimes very packed sometimes barely packed) snow.  The last 2 miles of the hike were pretty muddy and wet.  It was a really tiresome cycle of sloppy snow, muddy areas, snowy bridges and back to snow over and over again.  Still, this was a quirk related to the exact time and day we chose to do this hike not a failing of the park.  There were MANY bridges and boardwalks of various sizes that attempt to spare people from dealing with mud and mess on this trail.  There are also other loop possibilities at the park.  We bumped into one guy who had just finished climbing the hill on a red trail that he said nobody had walked on yet since the snow.  I can barely imagine how hard it would have been since following the sparsely placed trail blazes combined with the challenge of walking on even packed snow made this a very tough hike.  He had to break trail essentially the whole way.