New Jersey was renowned for its iron mines. Mine Hill Township, New Jersey, is loaded with the remnants of old iron mines. The Dickerson Mine Preserve, located in Ferro Mont, in Mine Hill Township offers many hilly trails for bicyclists and hikers alike to explore, with plenty of trees, mushrooms, deer, brooks, and swampland to observe. Most of the preserve is canopied by deciduous trees and the forest floor is mostly bare, typical of an area with heavy deer grazing. What brought me to the preserve was its iron mining history, and for sure there is plenty to see. I saw dozens of pits, tailing piles of ultra-mafic ore, scatterings of slag (glows orange in UV), coal (used to process ore), and stone walls, that could have been property lines or walls of buildings. It is like an outdoor mining museum. I in the tailing piles I observed hunks of quartz as big as my forearm, apatite-speckled magnetite, and rocks with crystalline quartz, feldspar, apatite (glows pink in UV), magnetite, biotite, hornblende, and titanite. The very best ore must have gone to a forge, but there is left plenty to behold and document. There are several mines in the park, including: BAKER NO 1 MINE (1863-1891), BAKER MINE LOWER HILL (1868-1883), CANFIELD MINE (1873), COW-BELLY VEIN (1713-1883), BLACK HILLS MINE (1879-1900), and KING MINE (1853-1880). There are many other mines in the neighborhoods surrounding the preserve as well, like the Canfield Phosphate Mine.
I entered the park at the Dickerson Mine Preserve Parking area on Frank Street in Mine Hill.
The well-worn trail into the park was festooned with all sorts of small rocks, including tiny glacial erratics, ore and slag — a good sign of things to come.
Near the top of the entrance trail, I was greeted by this anthropomorphic tree. Like something from the Wizard of OZ.
The park is pockmarked with dozens of pits, some filled with water, most filled with debris. I was careful not to slip into one of these pits — no telling how deep they go!
The park has many trails, some designed specifically for the enjoyment of bicyclists featuring hair-pin turns, and jumps made of tailing piles and brown earth. There are huge tailing piles everywhere, with watermelon-sized rock covered with green lichens. Folks I met, including the bikers, hikers and local experts, were all polite, kind and chatty if you engage them. If you go, make sure to wear long pants and a shirt with long sleeves to protect against ticks. You will get your shoes wet in muddy places, so be prepared for that.
If you take a trail to the left, down a hill, over a brook and across the clear-cut area for tight-tension electric wires, you’ll get to the Baker Mines, which are most impressive.
A wood-plank path through the swampy, weedy high-tension wire area:
This pit, that could swallow a bus, is the entrance to the BAKER NO 1 MINE. It is located behind the Dunkin Donuts on Rt. 46.
A short walk away is what appears to be an adit to the BAKER MINE LOWER HILL. It looks like a gorge that drains water from the mine.
There are plenty of human artifacts not related to mining, like gun stocks and rusting, abandoned cars:
The Dickerson Mine Preserve is excellent for biking, hiking, exploring Morris County nature, and particularly wonderful if you like geology, mining, mushroom photography, and observing the effects deer feeding can have to a deciduous forest in the absence of predators.
Resources:
- Abandoned Mines in New Jersey.
- Ferro Mont, Mine Hill (mindat.org link)