Lenape Trail Section in Urban Essex County, NJ Gets Trail Markers

Thanks to some recent trail work, walkers in Brookdale Park in Montclair, NJ, may learn that they are, and have been, trail walking.

On Tuesday, May 13, Trail Conference volunteers and staff worked with employees of the Essex County Parks Department to install 12 trail bollards along a one-mile stretch of the Lenape Trail in the park.

The bollards not only mark the Lenape Trail and draw attention to it in a busy urban park, but function as mini kiosks, describing the trail’s entire 34-mile route and providing instruction on how to read the yellow paint blazes that indicate the trail’s path.

Several other parks on the Lenape Trail’s route will get the bollards in the future, but most direction for the trail is provided by traditional yellow blazes painted on trees.

The Lenape Trail forms a great arch from Military Park in Newark west to West Essex Park, an undeveloped largely wooded wetland along the Passaic River. Its northwestern terminus is at Bloomfield Avenue near the Essex Mall at the intersection of Passaic Avenue. A southern branch leads to South Mountain Reservation. It is currently maintained by the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference.

Learn more about the Lenape Trail at www.nynjtc.org/park/lenape-trail. To learn about volunteering on this or other trails, contact the Trail Conference at [email protected].

Photo: From viewer’s left to right: Paul Paisano, Sean Hanonangie, and Michael Nugent from Essex County Parks; from the Trail Conference, volunteer Sam Huber (Trail Chair), volunteer Federico Nealon (Lenape Supervisor), staff member Peter Dolan, and volunteer Marc Elfenbein (Lenape Maintainer).

Also helping that day but not pictured was parks staffer Ken Edler. Thanks go to Tara Casella, Environmental Coordinator in the Essex County Office of Environmental Affairs, and Carmine Raimo, Superintendent of Essex County Parks, for their help in arranging the work crew.