A Refreshing Gateway Into Your Own Backyard

Laurie Lico Albanese is the author of The Miracles of Prato and the memoir, Blue Suburbia.  She teaches writing in Montclair, where she lives with her family. You can follow Laurie on her year-long walking project at MyBigWalk. Her latest adventure took her along the Lenape Trail:

The thirty-year-old Lenape Trail is about to be given a new coat of paint.

If you're like me, you've seen those fading yellow Lenape Trail markers painted on trees and lampposts around Montclair and wondered what they are and where they lead. Maybe you've even jogged through Brookdale or Yantacaw Brook parks and up into Mills or Eagle Rock reservations with one eye on those markers and another on the sign posts that seem to pop out of nowhere to announce the Lenape Trail…and then disappear without a trace.

Steve Marano, a long-time Nutley resident, was out with his daughter one morning last June when he spotted a trail sign, followed a yellow blaze, and let curiosity get the best of him.

One thing led to another and today Marano is the chair of the Lenape Trail Revitalization Project leading the effort to re-blaze the 34-mile Essex County Lenape Trail and make it an official thruway on the 130-mile Liberty Water Gap Trail that runs from the Delaware Water Gap to Liberty State Park in Jersey City.

The revitalization efforts have been greenlighted by County Executive Joseph DiVincenzo, Jr., and been taken under the auspices of the NY-NJ Trail Conference, a 90-year-old organization that creates and oversees 1,700 miles of trails, Marano said.

"Joe [DiVincenzo] knows that urban trail revitalization is something people want," he added.

I set out early one Saturday in mid-June to walk a leg of the trail with Steve Marano and to meet up with some of the folks who are helping bring his project and vision to life.  It was a hot morning, and I found him near the Brookdale Park Rose Garden, studying prototype trail markers with Peter Gargiulo, chair of the Brookdale Park Conservancy.

Joggers, walkers and cyclists of all levels skirted by as we weighed the merits of various colors and designs for new aluminum trail blazes for the Lenape and Liberty Water Gap trails, which will run contiguously through Essex County.

"How many people do you think know they're on the Lenape Trail?" Marano asked as a pair of joggers passed.  We all knew the answer: probably none.

The Lenape Trail was created thirty-years ago by now-retired Morris County Park trail coordinator Al Kent, who wanted the pathway to connect as many parks, reservations, points of interest and beauty in Essex County as possible. A quick visit to the trail website shows the point-to-point path beginning at Essex County Environmental Center on Eagle Rock Road in Roseland and ends just past Branch Brook Park in Newark (the trail used to run to the Pulaski Skyway). Along the way it travels through Livingston, Essex Fells, Verona, Montclair, Clifton, Bloomfield, Nutley, and Belleview, traversing woodlands, parks, and residential areas in equal portions.

Over the years the trail has gained some recognition, but never what Marano believes it deserves.

We only had time to walk a three-mile stretch of the Montclair portion on our Saturday excursion, and so joined by Lori Loebelsohn of the Bike&Walk Montclair complete streets advocacy group, Marano and I hitched our daypacks and water bottles onto our shoulders and set out to follow the fading yellow markers north, past the Brookdale tennis courts and out onto Bellevue Avenue, where we paused for photos at the Lenape Trail marker that prompted my guide's initial involvement in the project.

Across Bellevue we turned into residential Glenside Terrace and soon found ourselves ducking under dense foliage that opened into the southern end of Yantacaw Brook Park, where the fountains were bubbling and cool and the park was empty.

"I think this is one of the prettiest parts of the whole trail," Marano said. He didn't seem to mind the geese, and they didn't mind us, either.

From there we trekked along the rear of the Northeast Elementary school, looped through tiny Teurs Park and then crossed Alexander Avenue to find the hidden entrance to the little-known Alonzo F. Bonsal Wildlife Preserve, which has its headway off LaSalle Road on a dead-end street. The preserve isn't an official part of the trail, Marano said, but he hopes to mark it as trail spur that will bring awareness and perhaps some cleanup efforts to the 20-acre area, which includes a lovely brook and bridge.

Loebelsohn, who is a cycling enthusiast, was thrilled to discover Bonsal preserve for the first time, and also to learn that a good portion of the Lenape Trail runs along paved roadways, making trail revitalization and awareness  something the Bike&Walk Montclair group could become involved with and support, she said.

Although the trail was created as a hiking venue, Montclair High School senior Ian Vanderklein, working under the guidance of NY-NJ Trail Conference executive director Ed Goodell, recently charted the entire length of the trail on bicycle for his senior-option school project

A Tufts University-bound outdoor enthusiast, Vanderklein carried a global tracking device when he rode the trail, and used it to record every yellow blaze marker he found. When he lost the trail, which happened often, he sometimes rode in circles until he picked up the path again.

"Overall it's a great trail," Vanderklein told me. "It's about fifty percent residential Montclair-type roads, and half woods.  One of the cool things about biking all this was that I'd never known about Branch Brook Park, I didn't know about the cherry blossoms, I'd never really hiked through Eagle Rock before."

After stopping with us at the Bonsal preserve, Loebelsohn peeled off and Marano and I hiked uphill into the southern edge of Mountainside Park, beside the Presby Memorial Iris Gardens. After a sweaty last forage up the steep incline at the south-east edge of Mills reservation, we were met by Luke Perry, a mountain biker who's been unofficially grooming and maintaining the Mills branch of the trail, and John Moran, an official with the NY-NJ Trail Conference.

The three men were all meeting for the first time.

The volunteer revitalization efforts of the Lenape Trail are part of a new and growing grassroots effort to promote, develop, and utilize multi-use urban trails across the county and the state. What began thirty years ago, with the dream of modest county worker Al Kent, is now the focus of a small but exciting renewal project supported by a host of organizers and enthusiasts like Marano, Gargiulo, Perry, and Moran.

Marano's budget to date consists solely of a $4000 NJ Department of Transportation grant obtained via the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy. But his vision is clear, and the goals he and Kent set for the Lenape Trail and the longer, more ambitious Liberty Water Gap Trail, seem poised for fruition.

"What would define success?" Marano asked, rhetorically. "If people using the parks see the signs and decide they're going to follow the trail, and the reverse also – if people walking the trail decide to use the parks more."