The main entrance to High Mountain Preserve has been uprooted and will be closed for a year, said Stephen Bolyai, vice president of administration and finance at William Paterson University.

Neither the Wayne Department of Parks and Recreation nor a group that maintains the hiking trails offered hikers an alternative route now that the trail has been severed by the university's realignment of College Road between Wayne and North Haledon. The new road cuts directly across the trail.

Hikers heading into High Mountain Preserve from College Road now cross a scarred moonscape of crushed rock, soil and dismembered trees. Heavy machinery churns the earth, cutting a path for the road, and a deep gully has been blasted next to the trail, now covered in tree limbs. Rain turns the dirt gulch into a slippery mud pit.

Robert Simpson, a member of the Wayne Environmental Commission, fears that the construction site is a hazard to hikers.

"I'm sort of surprised, actually, that the college has not blocked it off and said 'enter at your own risk,'" he said. "It wouldn't be hard for some child to fall."

Simpson looks after the Yellow Trail along the preserve's high ridge for the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference, a volunteer organization that maintains more than 1,000 miles of hiking trails throughout the region.

"I would echo those concerns," said Russell Schubert, director of Wayne's department of Parks and Recreation.

That park entrance will close soon, Bolyai said. "The contractor is in the process of putting up some barriers," he said.

The entrance will be closed until construction is completed next spring.

The township had not designated another main entry point for the coming season, Schubert said. There are 10 other entry points to the trails.

"However, none of them have the parking facility that William Paterson was able to give us," he said.

Samantha DeMaria of Hawthorne hiked the trail about a month ago and found the trees hacked away and the trailhead gutted.

"I haven't been back since that," she said.

DeMaria, 25, said her boyfriend still uses the entrance regularly for mountain biking.

Hikers can enter High Mountain Preserve through other entrances, like those on Urban Club Road or Chicopee Drive in Wayne, as well as Scioto Drive or Reservoir Drive in Haledon, Simpson said.

Edward Goodell, executive director of the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference, said he receives calls once or twice a month to reroute trails because of development. In this instance, the conference received no notice that the trailheads would be temporarily shut, Goodell said.

At the university, Bolyai was surprised to hear that the conference maintained the trails, part of which cut through university property. The university has a reforestation policy planned after the road's completion, and commissioned an environmental impact survey from Stagg Associates in Oakland, which assured school officials that the route change did not place any endangered species at risk. The university intends to build new trailheads and a 12-space parking lot on the north side of the rerouted road.

Even out of visible range of the gutted trailhead, the sounds of heavy machinery remind some hikers, they said, that the state's ever-expanding development stands on nature's doorstep.

"A preserve, at least as far as people are concerned, is a place to escape from a world dominated by humans, a place where you're permitted to be a small part of something larger," nature writer Bill McKibben said from Middlebury College in Vermont, where he is a guest scholar. "But if the outside world presses in constantly, with light or sound or smell, that disappearing trick gets harder."

Reach Asjylyn Loder |at (973)-569-7158 or loder@northjersey.com.