Regionally important property preserved in Sparta Mountains

Brian Beckmann can remember the long drives from his family home to the weekend retreat in the mountains of Byram Township in Sussex County. His family would pile into the car on a Friday and in the middle of the night find themselves at their little cabin in the Highlands surrounded by the sounds of nature.

View of Cranberry Lake, from newly preserved land in the Sparta Mountains

One winter night we arrived at the cabin and it was a beautiful moonlit night," said Beckmann, 55, recalling a memory from his teenage years. "Johnson's Lake is right across from our cabin and it was almost midnight on a crisp winter night. The lake was frozen and it had an inch of fresh snow with no tracks on it. We put on our skates and went skating in the moonlight. It was picturesque."

It was these types of memories that led Beckmann to move into the old family log cabin in the 1970s and, earlier this year, preserve the 47 acres of adjacent property. NJCF partnered with the Byram Township Open Space Trust Fund and the State Green Acres program to help the Township fund the $288,000 acquisition. NJCF brought the potential open space project to the attention of Byram Township officials and then led the preservation effort. The Morris Land Conservancy helped the Township receive Sussex County open space funding for the project.

"This has always been a special place for my family and I believe in conservation," Beckmann said. "I think it's a great use of the property. You can climb to the top of the mountain here and you can see the Delaware Water Gap. It's hard to find special places in New Jersey for recreation and this is definitely one of them."

The beautiful, steeply sloped property, managed by Byram Township, is between Cranberry and Johnson Lakes and is available for passive recreation, which means more people like the Beckmanns can create their own memories on the land. The property was identified by NJCF's Garden State Greenways open space planning program as an important regional natural area because it is near other preserved lands. Garden State Greenways provides online open space planning tools at www.gardenstategreenways.org.

The greenways program helps planners statewide identify tracts of land that are "hubs"—large areas of important natural resource lands—as well as land that can be important in connecting already preserved natural areas. With a large patch of contiguous forest near Allamuchy State Park, the Beckmann property also is important to the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference's efforts to build the Highlands Trail.

The property is located in the southern part of the Sparta Mountains in NJCF's Sparta Mountain Greenway project area. At the westernmost ridge of New Jersey's northern Highlands, the greenway offers magnificent vistas overlooking pristine lakes and ponds and a diversity of natural communities. Mature forests and steep ridges protect threatened red shouldered hawk, wood turtle, spotted salamander, timber rattlesnake and bobcat. The forests provide critical groundwater aquifer and water quality protections. Wetlands and ponds provide flood control and habitat for amphibians and wading and migratory birds.

In the southern portion of the Sparta Mountains in Byram and Andover Townships and Hopatcong Borough, there is an opportunity to preserve more than 5,000 acres of land that can connect natural areas between state parks and wildlife management areas from Hamburg to Allamuchy. In the northern Sparta Mountains, more than 5,700 acres are already preserved and NJCF has played a key role in these conservation efforts dating back to the 1990s.

New Jersey's Green Acres Program has identified the Sparta Mountain south area as its top priority for funding through the federal Forest Legacy Program for land preservation efforts. You can support these efforts by urging New Jersey's Congressional delegation to back this initiative.