B
BarryC
Guest
All,
I was just thinking about this at work today. Across the street from my old house in North Jersey there is an abandoned quarry that I used to walk around in when we still lived up there. It's very odd.
First, the woods behind our house was an old field that was left to grow up into woods starting probably in the 1940s. The trees were Red Maple, Bigtooth Aspen, Quaking Aspen, Pitch Pine, Flowering Dogwood, Red Cedar, and I forget what else. Every year when we rototilled the garden in the spring we had to pull out more rocks out of the garden and dump them on the rock pile. If you walked through our woods and went further to the left into another patch of woods, there was a forest of Beech trees, some of them quite large. That's weird.
But even more weird is, across the street, the woods behind those houses had all oak trees with huckleberry bushes in the shrub layer! It's like Pine Barrens that turned to Oak because of lack of fire or something. The quarry was back there behind that woods. But it was different. There was some kind of white stone and I also found some tiny (half inch or smaller) quartz crystals. Someone once told us that the quarry was actually for the purpose of extracting silica sand from the ground. I don't know if that's true or not. Also, young Pitch Pines were growing up all through certain areas of it. And one house on that side of the street had a very large Pitch Pine in their front yard. It was the only older one I had ever seen in that part of the state. But one year they had it cut down for no apparent reason.
So... I was wondering if anyone would be up for a trip to explore that quarry. I was looking at the aerial photo on Mapquest, and it's still there, along with the woods around it. If we were to go, I'd like to carpool with someone with a vehicle that gets better gas mileage than mine. :wink: Of course I'd pay for gas.
The place is located in the western part of Roxbury Township, Morris County, on Hillside Avenue in Succasunna. It's just over the township line from Mount Olive Township.
Of course exploring that quarry wouldn't take all that long, and there would be lots of time to hit another area, maybe drive the Old Mine Road or something.
What does everyone think? It's just an idea, but maybe some folks would be interested.
Barry
I was just thinking about this at work today. Across the street from my old house in North Jersey there is an abandoned quarry that I used to walk around in when we still lived up there. It's very odd.
First, the woods behind our house was an old field that was left to grow up into woods starting probably in the 1940s. The trees were Red Maple, Bigtooth Aspen, Quaking Aspen, Pitch Pine, Flowering Dogwood, Red Cedar, and I forget what else. Every year when we rototilled the garden in the spring we had to pull out more rocks out of the garden and dump them on the rock pile. If you walked through our woods and went further to the left into another patch of woods, there was a forest of Beech trees, some of them quite large. That's weird.
But even more weird is, across the street, the woods behind those houses had all oak trees with huckleberry bushes in the shrub layer! It's like Pine Barrens that turned to Oak because of lack of fire or something. The quarry was back there behind that woods. But it was different. There was some kind of white stone and I also found some tiny (half inch or smaller) quartz crystals. Someone once told us that the quarry was actually for the purpose of extracting silica sand from the ground. I don't know if that's true or not. Also, young Pitch Pines were growing up all through certain areas of it. And one house on that side of the street had a very large Pitch Pine in their front yard. It was the only older one I had ever seen in that part of the state. But one year they had it cut down for no apparent reason.
So... I was wondering if anyone would be up for a trip to explore that quarry. I was looking at the aerial photo on Mapquest, and it's still there, along with the woods around it. If we were to go, I'd like to carpool with someone with a vehicle that gets better gas mileage than mine. :wink: Of course I'd pay for gas.
The place is located in the western part of Roxbury Township, Morris County, on Hillside Avenue in Succasunna. It's just over the township line from Mount Olive Township.
Of course exploring that quarry wouldn't take all that long, and there would be lots of time to hit another area, maybe drive the Old Mine Road or something.
What does everyone think? It's just an idea, but maybe some folks would be interested.
Barry
<----- Ken's neighbor