Wawayanda State Park

The Lake at the Center of Wawayanda State Park

The water at Wawayanda Lake is clear enough that you can watch a paddle blade fade a few feet down before it disappears. The lake runs 255 acres, glacier-carved and ringed by forested hills, with a white sand beach on the north shore and picnic tables and grills behind it. Swimming is only open when lifeguards are on duty in summer, so check the day’s status before you load the car. Flatwater Paddle Co. rents kayaks, paddleboards and rowboats out of the boat launch lot in season, and gasoline motors are banned on the water, which is why mornings out there stay so quiet.

Sixty Miles of Trails

The park covers roughly 34,350 acres, straddling Vernon Township on the Sussex County side and West Milford on the Passaic side, and more than 60 miles of that is marked trail. Much of the hiking trail network follows old logging roads cut by the New Jersey Zinc Company in the 1940s, which is why so much of it runs wide and rolling and works as well for mountain bikes and horses as it does for boots.

The Appalachian Trail and Wawayanda Mountain

A 19.6-mile stretch of the Appalachian Trail runs the length of the park, white-blazed and hiking only. The climb up Wawayanda Mountain from Route 94 in Vernon, the one everybody around here calls the Stairway to Heaven, tops out at Pinwheel Vista with the black dirt farms of the Vernon Valley laid out below.

The Furnace and the Village That Vanished

Walk east from the boat launch and the stone Wawayanda Furnace comes up on your left, 37 feet of masonry standing in the woods off the Double Pond Trail. Built in the mid-1840s, it smelted local ore into iron good enough for train wheels. The lake has an industrial past too: two smaller ponds known as Double Pond were dammed to power the furnace and its mills, and Beech Island out in the middle is the high ground that once separated them.

Before You Go

The main entrance sits on Warwick Turnpike, and a per-vehicle fee applies from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day, covered by the annual State Park Pass. Lots fill fast on hot weekends and the park does close at capacity, so early is better, with somewhere in Vernon as a fallback. Dogs are welcome on leash on the trails but not on the beach. Four group campsites are open April 1 through October 31, reservable through camping.nj.gov.