The Summer of 2017 saw me and Ben knock out quite a few highpoints in New England. From a sidewalk near the Delaware/Pennsylvania border, to a cool summit in New Hampshire, to just missing the Vermont Highpoint and having to settle for Ben and Jerry’s to a visit to Maine to our last highpoint of the trip, Highpoint, New Jersey, it made for a great summer vacation.

I’ll be honest. I didn’t have high hopes for the New Jersey highpoint. All I thought of when I thought of New Jersey were Enzo and Cass, fist pumping, and not pumping my own gas. I didn’t research this highpoint much. I had no idea before going there that the Appalachian Trail ran through New Jersey, much less this highpoint.

Apparently, I had New Jersey all wrong.

: Getting to the top of the Garden State (22/50)

A Beacon of Hope

Let’s start with the monument at the top of the highpoint. It is a complete beacon toward the hope of humanity. World War I shattered lives and horrified people at the absolutely cruelty of modern warfare. We see so many monuments, such as this one, that were built after that war. People thought that such gruesome combat would not happen again. The Treaty of Versailles was signed to end all war! Sadly, just less than a decade after this monument was built, the drumbeat of World War II started sounding in Poland, and just two short years later, the US would find itself sending its soldiers to battlefields around the globe.

While the hopes behind such monuments may have been dashed, the hope that one can feel on this trail can last a long time. It was a peaceful hike. It was not very busy. It had enough difficulty on the way to the 1803 ft summit, but it was not enough to wipe you out.

A Chance Encounter

We ran into a AT through-hiker working south to north. We talked for a bit on the viewing platform for the monument that is on the trail. I marveled at her dedication to the hike. It was hard to fathom the miles she had hiked from Georgia. It was crazy to think about the miles she still had to go and the terrain that remained. My legs got sore thinking about it.

Everything about the journey took dedication. The time one has to dedicate to the journey. The sacrifices on must make in terms of relationships. Do you have to have an uber-understanding employer or an amazingly flexible job or built-up wealth or no worries about money for a while for such a trip? It has to be something along those lines, right? This hiker was even so dedicated that she had shaved her head to make life easier on the trail. I’m always amazed by and a little jealous of those who get to make these type of trips. I don’t know if I will ever have the time, money, energy, or dedication to do something such as this.

Aside from meeting someone along the trail, we saw a creature we had not seen at home before–a chipmunk. I always thought of them as little squirrels, but that does not do justice to their cuteness. The little things just adorably scurry to and fro through the woods.

If you check out the photos, you’ll see the trail itself is pretty wooded, as you’d expect. There are a few places where it was steep, but all in all, this is definitely one the family can do. While someone can drive up to the highpoint, this is a great one for anyone of any skill to hike. It was a great one for our last highpoint of our vacation.

The End of the Trail

After spending a little too much time on the trail and leaving later than we should have, we started the drive back to Mississippi. We headed through Scranton, PA, and we were a little too late to make the side trip to Hershey, PA. We stayed on Interstate 81, driving south through Pennsylvania and Maryland and West Virginia. We stopped somewhere in Virginia that night, maybe Winchester or Roanoke or maybe even Bristol. Time has a way of making your forget some of the details. I do remember the coolness of New England being gone and starting to feel the heat and humidity of heading back south.

This was a bit of a turning point trip. The next few years would become busy with life, work and baseball with Ben. All of these were and still are worthwhile endeavors, but they did slow the highpointing down a bit. Still they were more memories made that I would not trade.