Title: 
Scenes From The Ny, Nj Highlands Mountaintops

Word Count:
473

Summary:
It's a sultry June day on the summit of Wyanokie High Point, 920 feet high in the northeast corner of the New Jersey Highlands. People in the towns below swelter, and to the east the New York City skyline steams in the humid air, but up here a steady breeze drifts in from the higher mountains to the west. Hikers come up here in all seasons, under different skies; sometimes the air swirls, bursts in gusts, or tries to carry you away, but always it moves, like the tides of an i...


Keywords:
highlands,hiker, ny,nj,trail conference,george petty,paul simari,audiobooks,hiking jersey highlands


Article Body:
It's a sultry June day on the summit of Wyanokie High Point, 920 feet high in the northeast corner of the New Jersey Highlands. People in the towns below swelter, and to the east the New York City skyline steams in the humid air, but up here a steady breeze drifts in from the higher mountains to the west. Hikers come up here in all seasons, under different skies; sometimes the air swirls, bursts in gusts, or tries to carry you away, but always it moves, like the tides of an invisible sea.

Those tides run back into all kinds of histories, whose consequences are part of the scenery. To the northeast on the ridge of Ramapo Mountain you can see recent housing developments, lines of townhouses along Skyline Drive. The great Wanaque Reservoir below to the east, completed in 1930, covered 70 homesteads, farms and commercial buildings of the Wanaque River valley to supply the growing cities of North Jersey with essential water. Streaks of rusty color in the rocks of High Point summit show the iron content of Highlands gneiss, which in rich veins was a source of iron ore for the rebellious colonies and the thriving nineteenth century iron industry of New Jersey. The smooth summit of High Point was polished about 15,000 years ago by the abrasion of ice and rocks embedded in the mile-thick Wisconsin glacier, and a close look at the summit rocks will show you small flecks of crystalline quartz and feldspar formed during a continental collision thousands of millions of years ago, just as visible life was beginning to appear on our planet. Hundreds of millions of years of erosion by water and wind have worn them down to the crystalline rock foundations you sit on now.

Although the view from the top of High Point will seem much the same next week, and even next year, the world of the Highlands is not static, but the product of processes of change proceeding on time scales ranging from decades to eons. Every day, grain by grain, water and wind erode the rock of High Point summit, carrying it down to the soil below, into brooks and streams, and finally to the sea. There it is deposited on the continental shelf, and pushed deep into the crust of the Earth to form new sedimentary rock, which awaits the next collision of continents to be raised into mountains again.

On this mountaintop, where you sit quietly in a soft breeze, you are part of many natural cycles that create new forests, watercourses, mountains, and civilizations out of the remains of the old. And every year, in another important cycle, new hikers, young and old, make their way to the summit of Wyanokie High Point to appreciate the beauty of the Highlands, and to wonder how their generations may influence its future.