Hiking Trail

Today I took a hike with a young man named Jeff Mertz, a Montgomery High School student who is doing an Eagle Scout project to improve Montgomery Township open space. He is working on the pathway that starts at the end of Linton Drive (off of Cherry Valley Road) and leads through the Cherry Brook tract. He and the other volunteers he recruits are improving the pathway by filling in holes that could trip hikers or sprain an ankle, and he is also mapping the pathway and posting an informational sign. The volunteers will distribute flyers with information about the trails to all the homes in the nearby neighborhoods of Woods Edge and Yorkshire Woods. He asked me to help him identify some plants along the trail so he could mention them on the sign.

We walked around two fields full of beautiful fall flowers, passing small vernal pools which are the perfect amphibian-breeding habitat. We saw milkweed plants covered with brilliant orange milkweed bugs, New York ironweed with violet blossoms, goldenrod, and a flower that was new to me, the rose-pink. Above all there were dragonflies zooming around. Jeff told me that a couple of years ago he volunteered as part of a group that was planting trees and shrubs in those fields for a reforestation project that is supported by a grant from the Fish and Wildlife Division of the NJDEP. The goal is to eventually reforest those two fields, which are surrounded by forest, to create a tract of woods that is large enough to support migratory songbirds. These birds need a large area of uninterrupted forest to protect them from nest predators, birds whose habitat is wood edges, and who lay their eggs in other birds' nests.

The trail also leads into the forest, which felt ten degrees cooler than the field today. There were some large trees, but the places we walked were not climax forest. They contained mostly trees that grow up in sunny places. When they die they will be succeeded by climax forest trees, which grow in the shade. There was not much to be seen on the forest floor, partly because of over-browsing by deer. Spring is the time to see the forest floor in bloom: small plants, called spring ephemerals, come up before the trees leaf out, photosynthesize as much as they can, bloom and then die back after the tree leaves block the sun. Daffodils are a non-native example of a spring ephemeral; mayapple and trillium are native spring ephemerals.

This trail skirts an approximately 90-acre wooded wetland that has been identified as the largest contiguous special resource value wooded wetland in Central New Jersey. Special resource value means that it is home to endangered species. Wetlands are valuable to the unique plants and animals that live in them, and important for their role in the hydrologic cycle. They act as sponges, storing rainwater that would otherwise add to flooding after a rain, then releasing is slowly during dry periods. The plants in wetlands clean polluted rainwater runoff, and wetlands provide groundwater infiltration, giving us the well water we drink. Recently I learned another important function of wetlands: they sequester carbon not only in wetland plants but also in wetland soils.

The trails Jeff is working on will someday connect with other trails in the area, so that people who live in Woods' Edge and Yorkshire Woods can enjoy this beautiful place and walk to visit friends on Cherry Hill Road. Eventually, other trails will join them and we should be able to hike from the Millstone River (and the Delaware and Raritan Canal Towpath) to the Sourland Mountains. I hope they will be used to reduce driving as well as for recreation. Thank you, Jeff, for all your great ideas and hard work.