NEW JERSEY TRAILS ASSOCIATION

The idea was simple: Help the people of New Jersey find beautiful places to go for a walk.

In 2002, D&R Greenway Land Trust created the New Jersey Trails Association. With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Association we launched this website to provide a list of area hiking trails complete with trail maps, guides, directions, and photos. At the time many trails were in need of maintenance on land preserved as open space by D&R Greenway and other nonprofit organizations and public agencies. Other preserved parcels needed trails designed and built. So NJ Trails began organizing volunteers to build trails, with the permission and enthusiastic support of those organizations.

Since 2005, a weekend crew of volunteers has worked every year throughout the season – September through May – building and maintaining hiking trails. The list of volunteers or those who aspire to do trail work has grown through word of mouth to a pool over 200 people, from which a crew of 10-20 volunteers participates every weekend. Work is scheduled every Sunday except for holidays or when the ground is impenetrably frozen, snow covered, or rain-soaked. Volunteers define, clear, and mark trail routes, build wooden bridges, set stepping stone creek crossings, construct stone stairways on steep inclines, and dig trails in to form level tread where they cross hillsides.

Today the website features 74 trails and is administered by volunteers who create, update, and post content. We do incur programming, web hosting, and trail map making costs in addition to trail building materials so please support us by donating to our parent organization, D&R Greenway Land Trust. Thank you!