Graves and Caves - Just Another Day at Wildcat

Looking back at old hikes, this one dates back to Sunday, September 6, 2015. 

Wildcat Reserve in Upper Hibernia, New Jersey

That day we tried Farny first, with wild, unrealistic hopes that it might be less packed. The lot - again - was completely full. We skipped right over to Wildcat for our Plan B. Wildcat is always a good bet because it has so many trails and span over 3,700 acres. There is always something new to explore. I had read a blog post about a graveyard in the middle of the woods at Wildcat. Which is surely not something you see every day! Today, armed with a map, we intended to find it. Our plans were to find the graveyard and return. My feet - remember, this was two before my broken ankle - were sore from planar fasciitis and they longed for an easy, level path. The hiker in me wanted to rebel, but my feet have the final say. 

Wildcat has several parking lots to choose from, but we started at our regular lot. The orange trail leads up to Hawk Watch and, if you take it to the right from the parking lot, it goes past a gate onto a level gravel trail. We passed the gate and began our hike. The scenery here was vastly different than the way up to Hawk Watch, which feels like deep woods. On this side of the orange trail there were tall grasses, telephone poles scattered here and there, and a wide gravel path. Liam was uncomfortable with the tall grasses. He is one inch shy of four feet tall and the grasses were almost as tall as he was! Whenever we reached a spot where the plants invaded the trail, Jon would push them away from Liam with his pole. But once the grass was up to Liam's shoulders, Jon would lift him up over his shoulder and carry him through. 

The trail was not well marked, but I suppose they figured you couldn't miss your way. But in fact you could as there were unmarked turn-offs that an inattentive hiker could wander down for hours. At every intersection, we would stop and Jon would go ahead to try to locate an orange blaze on a tree or rock. My feet couldn't handle too much unnecessary walking. We passed a few old boundary walls which, I thought, may have dated to the early Dutch settlers. You can find many Dutch walls in northern New Jersey. At this point, we consulted the map and took an unmarked trail that promised to lead to the graveyard. We weren't sure if it would be obvious once we got there.

Sure enough, it was obvious. There before us stood a large wooden sign with unmarked crosses leaning behind it. The graveyard dated back to 1866.

Graves peeked out behind the grass. I looked to Liam to see if he was nervous. Not one bit. He wanted to explore. Our only rules were: Do not step too close to the graves as it is disrespectful and do not touch the graves. It was hard to find where we could pick our way through; there was no clear path. And the headstones were scattered haphazardly. We started reading the names and dates on the graves and found that many on this side of the graveyard were Irish names with deaths dating to the beginning of the graveyard (according to the sign). 

We picked our way through and entered the other side of the graveyard which was less overgrown. There, resting on a headstone, was something I didn't expect to see in a Christian graveyard dating from the 19th and early 20th century. It was a little Native American dreamcatcher along with a shell. To this day I wonder who put it there. Was the deceased of Native American descent? Who was continuing to put little offerings on the gravestones? The dreamcatcher looked relatively new, definitely not dating back to the person's death. The name, an anglo name, held no clues. 

Dreamcatcher

A rosary on top of a headstone - who is leaving these offerings to this day?

I stopped and looked down. A shiver passed through me when I came upon two discs painted with pictures of menacing-looking clowns. I had found one on the top of Torne Mountain, by the stone living room. I hadn't picked that one up. I had to find out what the mystery of the clowns was and so I picked these two up. One was a record in terrible shape. Both had writing on their backs. Reading that the person who had left them had a facebook page and that it was a sort of game involving New Jersey's creepier places (like a graveyard in the middle of the woods) lessened the shivers. I put them back where I find them. 

Liam was hungry, so we took care to find a tree root and rock away from the graves where we could eat. It didn't feel scary in the graveyard, only peaceful. I felt like I could sit there forever. I could hear small animals - chipmunks maybe - rustling around, but other than that... stillness. Solitude. Even Liam was quiet - which is quite unusual for him. It was a lovely, still moment. 

After we ate a couple of Pop Tarts, we continued around this side of the graveyard. We noticed that the names here were Eastern European - in fact I looked them up later and found that several of them were Czech. I found it fascinating that a flimsy bramble border separated the Irish section from the Czech section. More questions. Why were they separated? This was a mining area around the time of these graves. Where had the homes of these miners been? The gravel road - did it date back further than I had thought? Were the boundary walls not, in fact, Dutch? Did they date to the 19th century, built by Czechs and Irishmen? So many questions.

Now, after having our fill of solitude, we had a decision to make. Would we walk back to the orange trail and take it back in a usual out-and-back fashion? Or make our trip a little longer, continue on the unmarked path, take it to the white - creating a loop - and take it back to the orange? This is called a lollipop or balloon hike. We decided on the latter. My curiosity won out over my aching foot. On our way over to the white, a mountain biker whizzed by. Before he could get much further past us, I called out.

"Is this the way to the white?" I called.

He stopped. He told us that yes, it was. He'd been biking here for many years. I asked if he had seen the graveyard and he gave us a knowing smile. Yes, he had, he visits it often. He told us about the miners who worked here, that if we looked around more, we'd see mining exploration pits. I had seen a few on the Beaver Loop Trail. We began talking in depth about Wildcat (he hadn't known it was even called Wildcat, he just knew the area by heart). Oh, we MUST see the bat caves, he told us. We asked if we could get to them from here.

"No, you have to park on the other side of the park." He began giving us instructions that we promptly forgot. Jon and I are hopeless when it comes to verbal directions. We do much better with a map. So after he left us, we checked the map. After our lollipop hike, we'd get in the car and drive to the other side of the park. From there, it was a very short hike to the bat caves. Bat caves? I couldn't envision what they would look like. 

We turned off to the white trail and immediately the terrain became a quite a bit rougher. I wondered how the mountain biker was able to ride this section. We walked on a narrow ridge with a trench beside it. As we were about to rejoin the orange, we saw a small group of people walking the opposite way. I was about to ask them if they had ever been to the graveyard before, but thought better of it. I felt it was probably better not to alert strangers to the graveyard in case they found it a good spot to drink and litter. I felt proprietary about the graveyard. I wanted to keep the deceased people's final resting place safe.

After finishing the hike, we came back to the gate, hopped into our car, and drove to the other parking lot.

When we got there, we noticed that there were two places to park. We took a look at the map and decided to follow the blue. The map made the bat caves look as if they were almost directly on top of the parking lot. As we walked down the blue, we came across several large ruins to our right. Of course we have to climb on ruins, it's our family's unspoken rule. We clambered to the top. I couldn't place the age of the structure. It appeared to be concrete, but some areas exposed roughly shaped stones underneath. I wondered if it was at all related to the mining community. 

We were getting more and more confused about where the bat caves could possibly be. We walked over to the brook and stood on another set of ruins. It was a lovely picturesque scene - as long as you didn't mind the cars whizzing by over the bridge. We consulted the map again, but in fact, contrary to what the map said, the bat caves were NOT close to the parking lot. We continued on and came to the intersection between the orange and white. We chose the white intuitively and, as it turned out, we chose well! We came across a sign that read: BAT HIBERNACULUM TRAIL

We turned off onto this trail and came across a group of teenagers, congregated on a wooden platform, smoking cigarettes. I asked them where the bat caves were and they were extremely friendly, pointing us in the right direction and informing us that it was like stepping into air conditioning. It was a hot day so this I looked forward to.

And they were right. As we walked towards the metal grate, surrounded on both sides by gigantic rock walls, we were met with an arctic blast. The temperature dropped from the 80s to possibly the 50s or below. It was like walking into a refrigerator. The sweat on my brow turned positively frigid. It was a welcome relief from the heat. The walls bore down on us, making us feel very small. I wanted to get closer to the grate, but Liam refused. At the cemetery, he was not nervous at all. Here he felt intimidated by the teenagers, he felt dread when he thought about a dark cave. This was too much for him. He stood back with Jon. I took a look at a sign beyond the metal grate that said that the bats need a stable temperature and environment and those who trespass into the cave will be prosecuted. The sign was stuck to a concrete wall behind the metal bars with small openings just big enough for a bat to pass through. I couldn't see how someone could get in to disturb the bats, but I kept my distance all the same. 

On our way out, Liam had an ataxic episode. It made him drag his feet, wobbly and not quite himself mentally. We tried to walk by the brook, he insisted he would be okay to continue walking, but after the amount of hiking we had done and Liam's ataxia that slowed him down and made him cranky, we decided to call it a day. We didn't feel we missed anything as the brook parallels a group of houses. We retraced our steps and headed back for the car. 

On the way home, I asked Jon if he had been creeped out at the cemetery.

"No, not until the very end." I asked why at the very end.

"Well, I saw a headstone and was reading the dates on it. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something on the ground and pulled Liam back away from it. Just behind the headstone, where the body would have been, was a big depression - a kind of pit - in the ground. I was scared because Liam and I almost fell in. Into a big hole. Or on top of a coffin. We just missed it. We could have broken our legs and been stuck in a grave out in the middle of the woods..."