I’m writing this from the future: April 2, 2023. Last night, while watching an episode of “The Curse of Oak Island” that featured wide stone walls. Rich paused the video, turned to me, and asked “Wasn’t there a hike we did where we were walking between these very wide, high stone walls?” I had had a similar vague memory, but didn’t recall enough of it to even mention it.

This simple question led to an evening of investigation into my notes, our photos and tracklogs, and eventally archived email messages. A message I had sent to the geocacher “Papadadio” in June 2006 was enough to help us crack the case.

We finally figured out that the place with the wide stone walls was the Indian Hill loop trail in Sterling Forest State Park, which we hiked on May 29, 2006. That same message mentioned a hike we did the following day, to Black Mountain in Harriman State Park.

What follows is what we were able to piece together from the notes, email messages, and other clues we were able to find about our hike at Indian Hill. We do not have a GPS tracklog of our route.

Today’s hike was an easy loop at Indian Hill in Sterling Forest. It was a beautiful hot day spent on lovely historic trails … and the heat must have been making us hungry, because I remember a lot of talk about ribs! After our lunch along the trail, we spent a few minutes lying in the sun at one of the ledgy overlooks, but it was just too hot to be enjoyable. We had to keep moving. We saw a few 5-lined skinks, which are always cool to see. We have only a few types of lizards in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and skinks (which are closely related to lizards) are much easier and more common to spot.

One of the most interesting aspects of the hike at Indian Hill are the high and exceptionally wide stone walls lining a woods road (called Broadway) toward the end of the loop. The purpose of the walls is unknown, but it seems likely that they were just a larger form of typical stone walls constructed in farm fields, in this case perhaps to keep livestock in certain areas. They seem much too large to be mere property boundaries.

Iron mining was an important industry throughout this area (see also the nearby Harriman and Bear Mountain State Parks). Near the beginning of the trail is the old Southfield Furnace. It was difficult to get close to the furnace because of the amount of vegetation (including poison ivy) surrounding it.

After our hike, we explored the very nice visitor’s center and their beautiful models of the area. There is another furnace nearby that was once part of the Sterling Lake Iron Works. This is quite interesting because although the furnace itself is a typical stonework structure, it was at one point surrounded by a neoclassical-style frame that once supported a dome on top. The dome is gone, but much of the frame remains, and it is quite a strange sight! There was far too much poison ivy to approach this structure.

We parked at the corner of two roads, in search of the blue trail shown on the map. We began to walk up a road and realized at some point that it was in fact the blue trail. This was a neat area too, with some “open pit” ore-processing ruins, concrete buildings, and a neat brick silo-like structure.

In need of more ribs, we of course stopped at the Outback Steak House at Crystal Run Crossing … for ribs!