Last week my friend Chloe and I decided to go camping, so we drove out a few hours north of the city along the Delaware river and into New Jersey to this area we had been to before called the Delaware water gap. It's mostly a very civilized recreational area for families to have "outdoor" types of fun, but there is also a more wild part where the Appalachian trail comes through, where you're allowed to camp if you're through-hiking, which we weren't. Still, after walking uphill for a bit carrying sleeping bags, food and a case of beer, we found this amazing grassy open space with a rocky outcrop that looked out over the valley and this long lake that had a camp at one end. It was the perfect place for a campsite, but there were no signs of anyone having used it really in a while - no fire circles or marks from tents or anything. We sort of improvised a clear area for a fire and surrounded it with rocks, then made a fire and whittled sticks with our pocketknives like true old men and cooked hotdogs on them and then toasted marshmallows. It was a really warm night, and we fell asleep soon after the sun finished setting (this took a few hours, with the shadow of the ridge we were sitting on slowly moving east over the valley). The whole time we kept hearing voices from down in the valley, as though kids were running around and playing down there around the camp, but we could barely ever pick out anyone walking by the boat house on the shore. Around 3 AM, I woke up almost sober and looking at the stars over my head saw the band of the milky way. I've only seen the stars like that a handfull of times before, and it's always astounding to see the sky so full like that, far away from light pollution and in the darkest part of the night. In the morning we woke up around 7 because the sun was beaming down on our cliff and made another fire for a second round of hotdogs. Then it got unbearably sunny and hot with the fire there, so we packed up, hopped in a lake, dried off and drove home.
What we saw:
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