{Journal Entry for May 10, 2008] Lee Reiser found a reference in a book, Weird New Jersey, to a patch of woods in the Pine Barrens where all the trees had been mysteriously blown down. Dallas, recalling the similar damage at Tunguska in Siberia, which was caused by an airburst, that is, a small comet exploding in the atmosphere, was interested in examiming the pattern of fallen trees. With Lee's help, we put together a mini-expedition to the site to look for clues of its origin. Bruce Aptowicz, a fellow kayaker, lent us short plastic kayaks, ideal for running the Cedar Creek, which flows near the site. Bruce, Lee, Columbia journalism student Russ Juskalian, Dallas Abbott and I (Bill Menke) all participated.

Dallas, Russ and I launched from the end of a dirt road off of Pinewald Keswick Road in Berkeley New Jersey in the late morning [Double Trouble Launch N39.90248 W74.24516 (WGS84)]. Lee and Bruce launched further upstream, desiring a longer paddle. The day was overcast and still. The air temperatue was in the 60's Fahrenheit and the water tempertaure was 59F. We launched the boats into a little side channel of Cedar Creek that looked like it had been dug in for that purpose. Cedar Creek itself, which is a stream about twenty-to-thirty feet wide, was running briskly, owing to all the rain that fell Friday. The paddling was relatively easy, except that we had to be wary of sunken logs and to paddle around them. We paddled a mile or so along this meandering creek, until it widened out, first into a small pond created by a beaver dam and then into Ore Pond, a larger pond created by a concrete dam. The beaver dam was several hunded feet long, and raised the level of the little pond by about eighteen inches above the level of the big one. A particularly tall and peaky beaver lodge was built in the small pond just behind the dam. We found a spot where the water was running over the top of the beaver dam and took our boats down this sluiceway. The current in the larger pond was sluggish, so we leisurely paddled across the pond, watching swallows and other small birds fly about. We portaged over the concrete dam, carrying our boats down a concrete stairway, so as to avoid scratching their hulls. The drop of water across the dam was about six feet. The spillway was releasing copious water and creating a small set of standing waves, which caused our little kayaks to bounce a bit as we rode through them.

Dallas had marked a GPS waypoint for a circular feature that she spotted on an areal photograph [Dallas' Waypoint N39.88305 W74.20630 (WGSS84)]. We stopped near it, pulled our boats from the water, and ate lunch. I hiked around a bit, over very boggy and bramble-ridden ground, trying to find the open area that Dallas had sighted on the photo. I checked both sides of the stream, and did find a treeless patch, about a quarter-mile wide, on the river-right (south) side. It was densely overgrown by highbush blueberry and I could not enter it. I returned to the boats with quite a few scratches on my legs. I found that walking was quite a bit easier in the streambed than on the bank, even in hip-deep water, and even against the current.

Lee and Bruce had caught up with us during my hike. Bruce, who knew the area said that the blowdown was still downstream of us, so we finished up lunch, reboarded our kayaks, and paddled further. In about a mile we came acoss a patch of woods on river-left (north) that had indeed experienced a blowdown. We pulled ashore and walked around this area where the trees had fallen [Blowdown N39.88253 W74.19890 (WGS84)].

We determined the following: The region of fallen trees is approximately 100 yards in diameter and elliptical in shape, with the long axis NE-SW; It is located immediately adjacent to Cedar Creek, with just a thin band of standing trees between the creek and the blowdown; The trees that had fallen were part of a larger stand of conifers that are about 50-75 feet high and up to 12 inches in diameter (though most were thinner, typically 6 inches in diameter); all the trees had fallen in the same direction, along a N40E-N220E (geographic) axis, with the roots at the the N40E end. There was about plus-minus 20 degrees of variability from tree to tree, but we observed no systematic pattern of variation as we walked about the area of the blowdown. Most of the trees seemed to have been simply knocked over; we could find only a few with snapped trunks. The NE edge of the blowdown seemed to start abruptly, yet the tall trees past the edge appeared undamaged. Both living and fallen trees retained all of their bark, except in places where neighboring trees obviously rubbed against each other as they fell. The intact bark was unpitted by any sort of debris. Some small trees, twenty feet high and with trunks two-to-three inches in diameter, had been bent over or knocked down along the same axis past the NE edge of the blowdown, in the region of standing tall trees. The ground at the center of the blowdown was pretty boggy but was not excavated or depressed.

Dallas' opinion was that this pattern of fallen trees (uniaxial as contrasted to radial, no pitting of bark, few instances of snapped trunks, no cratering of the ground) was not typical of an explosion of any origin (Tunguska-like or otherwise). Her best guess was that it was atmospheric in origin, as with a microburst-type downdraft and speculated that the bogginess of the ground may have caused that part of the stand of trees to be particularly susceptable to damage. Lee suggested that dendrochronology could be used to establish the year of the blowdown, and Russ suggested that meterological records could be checked to see whether conditions occured that year which favored microbusts. Dallas agreed, but was not interesed in further pursuing a feature that seemed unrelated to an explosion. We all agreed, though, that the blowdown was very interesting and well worth visiting.

I had pulled my kayak up to the river-right side of Cedar Creek, and so had to ford it both to get to the blowdown and then later as we left. On my way back I hit a deep spot, and went right over my head. Fortunately, all my equipment (GPS, camera, marine radio) ae fully waterproof!

We paddled another couple of miles along the meanders of Cedar Creek. The vegetation does really include quite a lot of cedar, but with other trees as well, including maples with bright red seed pods. Most of the deciduous trees and bushes are just startng to leaf out, but the grass and small perinneal plants are up and bright green. We encountered one small plant with bright yellow flower stalks, of a type I didn't recognize. We explored one small side channel, a hundred yards or so long, that lead to a private residence. We passed under perhaps a half-dozen bridges, some rustic wooden structures and others made of more utilitarian concrete. Swallows were nesting beneath them. We took out after couple of miles, at William Dudley Park, just off of Route 9 [William Dudley Park N39.86914E W74.17045 (WGS84)]. We then retrieved the cars we had left at the upstream launches. Lee and Bruce left me off along Pinewald Keswick Road, and I walked the dirt road back, through the pine barrens, to the launch site, where my car was parked. The line-of-sight distance from this launch to Dudley park is about 4.2 miles, but the distance we kayaked was considerably longer than that - about seven miles - due to the meandering of the creek. Total trip time was about 5 hours. My thirteenth paddle of the year.