Category: Hiking and Parks

You’ll find three signs within 100 feet of the entrance to just about any park in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. A notice about Spotted Lantern Flies, a warning about Lyme disease-carrying deer ticks, and a warning about rattlesnakes. Sometimes a warning about black bears as well. Spotted Lantern Flies are a threat to plants, but not people. Lyme disease, not treated early, can make your life miserable. A rattlesnake bite can kill you. A bear can eat you.

You know the risks, and how to mitigate them. Blueberries for the low price of 100 fly bites.

Apply tick repellant, and check for ticks after your hike. Don’t step on or near a snake. Make noise so the bears know you’re coming and avoid you. Don’t pet bear cubs or snakes.

Or, simply stay out of the Pine Barrens.

What the signs won’t warn you about is Deer flies. I can’t think of a more annoying pest. More annoying than mosquitos. Imagine being surrounded by a cloud of tiny needles that fly down and poke your face, neck, hands, arms, and legs, over and over again. The summer of 2022 was bad. Late spring & early summer was hot, and the flies were grotesquely plentiful. I had to hold my hands up by my face, like a boxer, and continuously swat them away. As my arms swung in front of me, dozens of flies bounced off my hands and arms. It was like fighting a ghost made of hundreds of thumbtacks. My face is tingling just thinking about them.

So I learned about Deer flies and bought a hat with mosquito netting and a long-sleeve shirt treated with pyrethrum.

Potential life-altering, and insanity-inducing threats aside, the Pines are a beautiful and mysterious place worth taking risks and fighting the occasional amorphous cloud of flies.

Cranberry bogs — especially those reclaimed by nature — are a beautiful sight to see, especially near sunset on a day when the air is still, and the water mirrors the sun, sky, and trees. Yes, plenty of flies too.

Take a quiet winding trail or dirt road around bogs, slow streams, and through groves of pines and oaks. Where will it take you?

Maybe the trail takes you to an abandoned grove of enormous blueberry bushes, where you can feast like a king until your lips & tongue are indigo, and your eyes and mouth widen with ecstasy, allowing the sun, and visions, and flavors of the blueberry bushes flow into your mind as a glorious memory you can always go back to, to lighten up a dark day.

Or maybe the trail takes you to a serial killer riding a bear using a rattlesnake for a whip, coming straight for you. Because they’re running from a massive cloud of Deer flies.

Yum or None & Done. Make the choice. Bear the flies to get the berries.

Jamesburg Park Conservation Area is a rectangular park in Helmetta, East Brunswick, and Spotswood, New Jersey. The part in Helmetta is well-manicured, and family-friendly, with a lake to kayak & a playground for kids. The part in East Brunswick is the gritty, sandy, muddy, get-ready-to-dodge ATVs in the woods part. That’s the part I like. Interestingly, the park is part of a  disjunct region of the New Jersey Pine Barrens, specifically called the Spotswood Disjunct Pine Barrens area. Disjunct means it’s geographically disconnected from the rest of the Pine Barrens. Middlesex county, home of East Brunswick, is New Jersey’s second-most populous county — so it is surprising to imagine any forest that has not been raised and replaced with tracts of beige condominiums & McMansions, let alone something exciting as sandy-soiled pine country.

People familiar with the better-known Pine Barrens in south Jersey will recognize many of the same plans and animals in Jamesburg park. Fowler’s Toads, wild blueberry-like plants, wintergreen, oaks, ticks, and of course Pitch Pines.

The geology is also similar: sandy soil, pure sand in some places, quartz pebbles, and plenty of bog iron/limonite.

The roads in the area have so many pot-holes, it’s like gray Swiss cheese, or maybe the Moon. Single-lane Locust Ave (East Brunswick) has a spacious rock parking lot near a trailhead. Here’s a map of the trails. I parked there and entered the most challenging part of the hike — the Red trail — a sloping trail festooned with ankle-rolling stones, and toe-busting roots.  No obvious pines at this point  — mostly deciduous trees. The Red trail transitions to the Yellow trail, with leads to the White trail. Once on the White Trail, known as the Pitch Pine Loop, it’s clear you’re in the Pine Barrens. The ground becomes golden-white sand, and oak and pine trees are abundant, as are the blueberry-like berries, striped wintergreen, and plentiful mushrooms found in Pine Barrens of Burlington County. In spots the soil transitions from sandy to red/brown soil, quartz and bog iron are abundant, but mica schist and sandstone can also be found in places. The overall hike reminds me of Hartshorne Woods as much as the Pine Barrens. Hartshorne contains 4 major geologic formations (Shrewsbury Member of the Red Bank Formation, Hornerstown Formation, Vincentown Formation, and the sandy, gravely, iron-formation-rich Cohansey Formation shared by the southern Pine Barrens). Jamesburg Park features just one (the sandy Magothy Formation), but it transitions through a few soil types, and Magothy isn’t known for the abundant iron I see in Jamesburg. I wonder if more than one formation is exposed in the area.

A word of caution about the park: there are a lot of ATV and dirt bike riders on the trails. Listen for their motors and get ready to hop off the trail when they approach. If you have a hearing disability, come with a friend who can listen to their engines.

High-tension wires border the park on the southwest side. Also a favorite area for ATVs.

On the north-east side of the park there’s some kind of foundation, covered with graffiti eyes:

Pretty but parasitic plants living off trees in low-nutrition soils: