[Journal Entry for February 8, 2010] I stopped at Cheesequake State park, near Cliffwood NJ on my way to a baby shower. This park is just off the Garden State Parkway, and thus easily accessible, though the location of the entrance, on Gordon Road on the south side of the park, is not well-marked. The park consists of a wooded, hilly area and adjoining marshes along Cheesequake Creek.

The park has several well-maintained hiking trails, denoted with blazes of different colors. I walked the Blue Trail in its entirety and took a short side-trip down the Red Trail as well. The Blue Trail first wanders through a wooded, hilly terrain dominated by tall oak trees. The hills are composed of poorly-consolidates Cretaceous silts and clays, whose cohesion allows for rather steep slopes. The hills are dissected with gullies that are on the one hand rather smooth in profile, but which nevertheless have rather steep sides. I noticed no outcrops of competent rocks at all, just small, iron-stained quartz pebbles. The park is a little south of the moraines that mark the southern terminus of the great Pleistocene Ice Sheets. The land is distinctly different in character than the very rocky hills characteristic of once-glaciated terrains.

The trail is built up in places with wooded staircases and puncheon (bog bridges). It wanders around the border of the marsh, sometimes crossing it via puncheon, sometimes ascending into the upland forest along its edge. The marsh is edge with tall phragmites grass but contains many patches of shorter grasses intermingles with low bushes. The trail passes several channels of open water. They plainly show up as a rectangular grid on a satellite photo, so they date from some old period of marsh agriculture, though from the ground their anthropogenic origin is not so evident. I sighted several mallard ducks as I passed by Perrine Pond. The marsh across from the pond has several osprey nesting platforms, but I saw no ospreys.

The trail would occasionally pass through stands of Pitch Pine. Their many cones were glowing rich brown in the afternoon sun. I took a short side-trip down the Red Trail to visit a northern white cedar swamp. These are tall evergreen trees with reddish brown trunks, growing among shallow ponds and rivulets. I sighted a White-Breasted Nuthatch clinging to the trunk.

About an hour.