Wanaque Reservoir

New Jersey, said the girl from New Jersey at a dinner party, is the armpit of America. There is nothing there but suburbs and roads for people to get through it or out of it.

I've crossed through New Jersey a couple of times now, and its almost true. Its an armpit. But she forgot some things: suburbs, road and strip malls. Gigantic ones that go on forever. Ikea follows Starbucks follows Macey's follows Mr Sleepy follows Micky D's follows Comfort Inn follows Starbacks follows Barnes and Noble and on and on and on, each with acres of parking.

But today Jersey revealed that every lymph gland has a pretty side ... or that before it became the Garden State they use to blurb up their number plates it must have been really lovely. I went hiking in the Wanaque Reservoir, in northern Jersey, with the hiking club at Columbia. 5 hours spent hiking around the reservoir, brief visit to a cave full of tiny, sleeping bats, past a waterfall and up through the 'valley of rocks' full of moraine from the ice age where bears scratch the bark of trees (though we only saw the bark, not the bears).




Its good that you can get out of New York relatively quickly - although even from that distance, you can still see the silhouette of Manhattan skyscrapers on the horizon.