New Heights

AMC Outdoors, June 2006

Standing at the base of a 150-foot cliff fronted by a field of car-sized boulders, it’s hard to shake the feeling that this area just doesn’t seem like New Jersey. Even though I’m only a few miles from the interstate, there aren’t any smoke stacks and the landscape is decidedly more interesting than the smelly, sprawling flatland that we’ve all seen from the Turnpike.

“Yeah, so this is Jersey,” says my guide for the day, John Anderson, motioning to the wall in front of us and the rolling hills off in the distance. As the Access Fund’s regional coordinator for the state and director of Access New Jersey, the local rock climbing advocacy group, Anderson has worked to ensure access to areas like this. And he relishes the opportunity to share the state’s climbing bounty with curious outsidersÑreporters, legislators, and anyone else interested in preserving access in the Highlands.

“The inside corner right here has a nice hand crack on it,” he says, pointing out a route to the top of the slab above us. “Go up that, get on top of the pillar, head straight up to the overhang traverse, and go up the left side of it up to the top. That’s just beautiful, classic.”

It’s early spring in the Highlands, the Garden State’s rugged and often-overlooked backyard, and the leaves have yet to return to the forest. Still, the area is surprisingly wild considering that we’re less than 40 miles from New York City. Next to us, the nearly vertical rock wall overlooking green pond stretches 200 yards to the right before disappearing around a corner, perfectly raw and unclimbed. Overhead, shrub-sized pines cling to the rock while patchy moss seems to creep up from the boulders below our feet. The whole scene is untouched, like something you would have found in the Gunks a generation ago.

We’ve come here with Anderson’s longtime climbing partner, Linda Koskoski, to explore some of the state’s better rock climbing areas. Both have been prowling these hills since the 1980s-and working to preserve their climbing resources for almost as long-and know just about every boulder, rock, and face worth visiting in the state. That’s crucial, too, because finding the climbing areas hidden in the Highlands isn’t always easy. In fact, Anderson admits, getting to the crags out here sometimes involves a topographic map, a trail guide, and more than a little creativity. “Most of this is totally unexplored rock,” he says, “literally out in the middle of nowhere. And you don’t know if the rock has ever been climbed.”

That’s one of the reasons that New Jersey isn’t usually thought of as a climbing destination. There’s rock here, but it can be hard to find and legal access has traditionally been spotty at best. And, with New York’s Shawangunks only a couple hours away, the local offerings are often passed over for the sure thing. Why spend hours bushwhacking around the Delaware Water Gap when you can be roped up at the base of the Trapps and ready to go by lunchtime? But the Garden State has been surprising climbers for years. Even Koskoski, who got her start climbing in Oregon, remembers “it was funny to come back here and think, ‘Wow, there really is a lot of climbing in New Jersey.”

On our drive up to the Highlands, Anderson pointed out dozens of small rock outcroppings set back in the woods, explaining the access issues he’d dealt with at each of them. Pointing to a series of ridges out in the distance, he explained which cliff faces are open and which are off-limits, which walls have been climbed and which are unexplored. As flat, barren, and boring as the eastern part of the state is, climbable rock seems to be everywhere in the northwestern Highlands. Still, we’re talking about small, scattered areas of vertical rock here, not 1,000-foot epics.

“You have to keep in mind that this is New Jersey,” Anderson explains on the way home from Green Pond. “It isn’t Yosemite and it isn’t the Gunks, but there’s a unique kind of cragging that goes on here.” Then, as if to emphasize his point, he stops our car at a roadside rest area and points out an unexpected gem: a looming, conglomerate slab rising 40 feet over the parking lot. The route begins between a garbage can and a picnic table, literally next to the highway. “This is indicative of the rock that you’ll find around here,” he says, “just a pudding stone type of rock. You can see the hand cracks going up there, and the further back you go the bigger it gets; good for top roping, good leading, keeps the mind going. The majority of places in New Jersey are local crags like this.”

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