Most people think of New Jersey, the most densely populated state in the U.S., and imagine the beginning of the Sopranos TV show, industrial wastelands, congested highways, urban sprawl and tens of thousands of warehouses and apartment complexes. New Jersey can be as lifeless, colorless, repetitive and joyless as a stack of discarded cinderblocks. But the truth is New Jersey holds plenty of culture and nature to offset the petroleum gray aura the state is known for. At least 40% of New Jersey is forests, parks and nature reserves. One of the best parks is the Watchung Reservation in Mountainside. Sandwiched between two major highways (22 and 78), Watchung Reservation contains a ghost town, the Feltville Copper Mine, and many hiking trails that wind through a deciduous forest (colorful in the fall), along bubbling, rocky brooks, and over and around many geologically interesting features.
Alongside the Sierra Trail, in the Watchung Reservation, there are massive exposures of the Orange Mountain Basalt lava flows. These lavas flowed when the mega-continent Pangea began to rift apart early in the Jurassic epoch. The rifting occured before the Atlantic Ocean formed and when Northern Africa was still connected to New Jersey. As Pangea started splitting, the crust thinned and magma rose to the surface, flowing across New Jersey and hardening in twisted columns like Play-Doh squeezed through turtleshell scute shaped holes. Colors vary from grays to green, weathered to orange in places.
You can see a few flows in the photos below. Some appear to be horizontal and some exhibit twisted, torn-ribbon shapes. The flows in the photo are about twenty feet high, and are very impressive when viewed in person.
In the Watchung Reservation park you can hike over the Orange Mountain Basalt and Preakness Basalt …
