Mike McCormick and South Jersey Trails

On an unfortunately cloudy day, I walked with Mike McCormick and his son Abe in Tall Pines State Preserve. McCormick writes a South Jersey hiking blog called South Jersey Trails. It similar to this blog, but much more in depth. I figured that doing a video interview with him would be a good way to pay homage to what a good hiking blog is supposed to be.

The South Jersey Trails blog has gotten a lot of local attention over the years. It has been featured in other hiking blogs, as well as magazines like Inside Jersey and New Jersey Monthly. There’s been a few other hiking blogs for South Jersey, but they all have died out while South Jersey Trails prevails.

For the blog, he has hiked over 130 trails and plans to hike more in the future. He’s looking to go to some parks in Ocean County, like the one I went to a couple weeks ago called Double Trouble State Park, and some others such as Cattus Island, Wells Mills, and Jake’s Branch county parks.

Outside of hiking in South Jersey, McCormick and his family have hiked in 28 of the 59 National Parks. He listed Yosemite, Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Big Ben among them.

McCormick also runs a boy scout troop, which he’s been doing for the last 7-8 years after being an assistant for a few years before that. He was in boy scouts as a kid, the troop he’s with now is the same one from when he was younger. Last weekend he took them up to the Palisades Interstate Park to go camping.

As for the preserve we walked in, Tall Pines State Reserve, it is Gloucester County’s first state-owned park.  110 acres of what used to be a golf course is now a park located in Deptford and Mantua Townships, 12 miles south of Philadelphia.  The Friends of Tall Pines rallied for the disused golf course to be turned into a preserve instead of a housing development, and succeeded.

The Friends of Tall Pines do clean-ups for the park and have information tables about the park at different local fairs and festivals. They plan on trying to remove invasive species as their next big project for Tall Pines.