Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area
Mount Tammany: New Jersey Looks Down on the Delaware
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
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Transcript
Mount Tammany gives New Jersey one of its most recognizable river views.
It also shows why “wilderness” near the Northeast's largest metropolitan areas is a complicated word.
More than twenty-seven miles of the Appalachian National Scenic Trail pass through Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. A Saturday hiker and a long-distance thru-hiker can occupy the same ridge and see the same river.
The view feels wild. Its accessibility is one reason people have fought so hard over what the valley should become.
Later we will reach the dam project that nearly replaced much of this free-flowing river with a reservoir.
For now, look down.
The landscape you see was never guaranteed to remain this way.
The ridge also carries a modern tension locals know well.
A place can be publicly protected and still be crowded, eroded, littered or damaged by concentrated use.
The popularity of Mount Tammany is evidence that conservation worked: people value the landscape enough to come.
It is also evidence that protection does not end management.
In the Northeast, the question is often not how to get people into nature.
It is how to help millions of nearby people share it without loving the place to death.