Donations to our Annual Fund go where our needs are greatest! The New York-New Jersey Trail Conference provides volunteers, training and workshops, technical assistance, tools, and supplies to trail projects in southeastern New York and northern New Jersey. Projects may include building new trails, restoring damaged trails, maintaining established trails, updating trail maps and books, and protecting trails and open space with grassroots advocacy efforts.
This season we are working on extending the Highlands Trails in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, and through Wonder Lake State Park in New York. We are developing new trail construction projects in Westchester County, New York, including building trails connecting Teatown Lake Reservation to Kitchawan Preserve and at Angle Fly Preserve in the Town of Somers. We are also building new trails in Sterling Forest State Park, which, when finished will offer the public access to such experiences as a panoramic view of Greenwood Lake from Bare Rock overlook.
On Bear Mountain in New York, we are hosting a unique series of workshops focusing on the art of stone splitting, stone step installation and stone crib wall construction as part of our Trail University course series. Those workshops advance our multi-year, multi-agency effort to reroute a badly eroded section of the Appalachian Trail on Bear Mountain and make it a family-friendly trail capable of sustaining decades of extra-heavy foot traffic. (The trail, so close to New York City, is one of the busiest footpaths in the nation.)
Our map makers are very busy. A fully updated and enhanced map of the Kittatinny Mountains has just been published and a revision of our popular North Jersey map set will be available this summer. A new edition of our Catskill map set is in the works and we are planning a brand-new trail map for central New Jersey.
Funds donated to our Annual Fund support all of these projects, and more.