I’ve written South Jersey to death — now I’m heading north

Sometime in the late 1990s, I was paddling a canoe down the Delaware River with my family and another family we were close to. The kids were young. We had put in at Milford, Pennsylvania, planned two nights on the river, and were taking out at Bushkill on the PA side. It was one of those trips that becomes a permanent memory — the kind you reference for the rest of your life as a marker of what family actually looks like when everything goes right.

Somewhere along that stretch of river, I paddled right past Walpack, New Jersey without knowing it was there.

I had no idea. I was focused on the current, the kids, the campsite ahead. On the Pennsylvania side the scenery rolled by and I didn't think much about what was — or wasn't — on the Jersey side of the water.

Decades later I started reading about Walpack Township and realized I had already been there. I just didn't know what I was looking at from the river.

That is the piece of this story I cannot stop thinking about.

There is a line at Route 70

I have drawn a line across New Jersey my entire life. It runs roughly along Route 70. Everything south of it is my territory.

I grew up in Atlantic County. Deep South Jersey roots — Pine Barrens, the Shore, the Delaware Bay, the back roads of Cumberland and Salem Counties. I have written about all of it. I have hiked it, driven it, canoed it, photographed it. For a brief stretch in the early 1980s I lived in Jackson, which technically put me north of the line, but that was radio pulling me around — it never really took. The pull of South Jersey always brought me back.

But here is the thing about drawing lines. Eventually you start wondering what is on the other side.

Wayne, December, and a very bad idea about sunset

A few years ago my buddy Wayne Cabot and I hiked the Delaware Water Gap in December. Wayne and I go back to 1982 — we came up in radio together and have stayed close ever since. He is one of those friends where you can pick up a conversation mid-sentence no matter how long it has been. We are also both the kind of people who think a four-mile hike in December sounds completely reasonable.

It was and it wasn't.

The hike up was genuinely stunning. Fresh snow on the trail, snow-covered branches overhead, the kind of quiet that only happens in the mountains in winter. The views from the ridge — one of those dramatic rock faces rising out of the mist across the valley — stopped us both cold. Not from the temperature. From the beauty. This is New Jersey. This is actually New Jersey. I kept thinking that the whole way up.

The problem was December. Specifically the part of December where the sun starts setting at four in the afternoon.

We were not back at the trailhead by four. We were somewhere on the mountain at four, following a trail that was increasingly hard to distinguish from the snow-covered everything else around it. It got dark fast. The kind of dark that makes a snowy trail and a snowy hillside look identical. Wayne and I made it down — obviously, I am writing this — but there was a stretch in there where the word "lost" was a genuine possibility rather than a hypothetical one.

We were fine. We were also lucky. And I would do it again in a heartbeat.

SEE ALSO: When New Jersey gets to be too much, I head down into the Pine Barrens

The undiscovered country

That hike planted something. I have been thinking about Warren and Sussex Counties differently ever since. There is a version of New Jersey up there that most people in this state — especially South Jersey people like me — have never seen. The Highlands. The ridges. The remote townships. Places where the population thins out, the roads narrow to two lanes, the cell service quietly disappears.

Which brings me back to Walpack.

Walpack Township in Sussex County has fewer than ten residents today. In the 1970s the federal government displaced most of its population to make way for the Tocks Island Dam project on the Delaware River. The dam was never built. The people mostly never came back. What remains is essentially a ghost town inside the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area — abandoned structures, empty lots, a handful of stubborn residents, and silence.

I paddled past it in a canoe in the late 1990s without knowing it existed. I am not making that mistake again.

The bucket list

So here is my declaration for 2026. I have written South Jersey to the bone — and I mean that with love, not exhaustion. The Pine Barrens, Strathmere, Cape May, Fortescue, the Delaware Bay shore. That territory is mine and I will keep writing about it. But the line at Route 70 is not a wall. It is just a starting point.

Before this year is over I am going to Sussex and Warren Counties. I want the Highlands. I want remote. I want the kind of hiking where you earn the view. A cold stream to swim in on a summer afternoon would not hurt either.

Walpack is first on the list. I want to see what a town looks like when history walked away from it and nature slowly walked back in. I want to stand on the Jersey side of the Delaware and look out at the water I paddled past twenty-something years ago — this time knowing exactly where I am.

Wayne, if you're reading this — same deal as December. Just this time we leave earlier.

👇 Here's the New Jersey wilderness I already know. The north is next👇