Five day hikes in New Jersey worth the drive

The Park Service rates the Red Dot trail difficult and calls it one of the most challenging in the park: 1.2 miles one way, 1,201 feet of climb, which works out to a thousand feet a mile. That's a real mountain gradient, and it surprises people who drove ninety minutes out of a city to get here. What you get at the top is the Delaware cutting straight through the Kittatinny ridge below you, with Mount Minsi facing back from Pennsylvania.

Do it the way the rangers suggest: up the Red Dot and down the blue-blazed Pahaquarry trail, which makes a three-mile loop and is kinder on the descent. There's a restroom at the Dunnfield Creek trailhead, and the park charges no entrance fee at all — a handful of the river beaches and boat launches have their own day-use fee, but no trailhead does. The catch is the lot. The Park Service says it fills quickly on summer weekends, and that the popular Water Gap lots are usually full by nine on Saturdays and Sundays from spring through fall. If you want a longer day from the same trailhead, the green-blazed Dunnfield Creek trail runs 3.5 miles and 966 feet up to Sunfish Pond, a glacial lake on the Appalachian Trail.

Norvin Green packs 49 miles of trail into a small forest, and the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference, which maintains them, rates the network strenuous and notes that nearly all of them are difficult. Take that at face value. The Trail Conference counts 27 viewpoints in here, and the walking between them is rocky, root-laced and steeper than the elevation numbers suggest, because the route keeps dropping into stream valleys and climbing back out.

The Trail Conference's own loop to the summit starts on Snake Den Road and follows the Otter Hole, Mine and Hewitt-Butler trails up, coming back past the Blue Mine, one of the old iron workings half the trails here are named after. The view from the top takes in the Wanaque Reservoir, the surrounding hills, and on a clear day the Manhattan skyline sitting on the horizon like a distant sandbar. The state's own description of Norvin Green promises the New York skyline, and this is where you collect it. The forest charges nothing and is open sunrise to sunset. The Trail Conference's advice for the place is short: take rugged shoes.

This is the odd one out, and I put it in deliberately. The state park service describes Cheesequake as the only park where the northern hardwood forest meets a southern pine barrens ecosystem at sea level, and the walking backs that up: open fields, saltwater and freshwater marsh, an Atlantic white cedar swamp and white sand under your boots, all within a couple of miles. Five marked trails share about nine miles between them, ranging from a mile and a half to three and a half, easy to moderate.

Nobody's coming here for the climb. You come for the geography lesson you get to walk instead of read: you cross from one biome into another and back inside an afternoon. The gate opens at eight and closes at eight, there's an entrance fee per car between Memorial Day and Labor Day, and it's free the rest of the year. Go on a cold clear morning in November and it costs you gas.