The useful thing to know before your first run here is what the ground is made of. These are the Highlands: old, hard, glacially scoured hills, and a great deal of the trail surface is exposed rock. Some of it is beautifully runnable. Some of it is a scramble with a trail blaze painted on it, and no amount of enthusiasm turns that into a running route.
So this page is organized by what you can actually run, in the order we would introduce them.
The four
Long Pond Ironworks
about 5 minHewitt, NJ
The nearest, the flattest and the most forgiving. Riverside trails through a preserved ironworks village, largely level, on ground that drains. This is the one to run before anyone else is up, the one that works in poor weather, and the only one on this list we would run in the dark.
Wawayanda Lake Loop
about 15 minWawayanda State Park
The standard long run: about six miles around the lake for roughly four hundred feet of climb, on wide and mostly benign trail. Popular with runners rather than just theoretically runnable. If you do one route here, do this one.
Sterling Lake Loop
about 15 minSterling Forest, NY
Around four miles for three to four hundred feet, on a mix of woods road, singletrack and a little pavement, with the best lake views of the four. Wet and muddy in spring. There is a longer variation closer to eight and a half miles if you want the whole morning. Some trails in the fire zone have been closed since the November 2024 Jennings Creek Fire and had not reopened at the last official notice — check the park’s alerts before you set out.
Jungle Habitat
about 10 minWest Milford, NJ
Nine to eleven miles of purpose-built mountain-bike singletrack, which is also excellent running — flowing, well graded and stacked in loops so you can choose your distance at each junction. Give way to bikes, and stay off it when it is wet.
What the ground does to your pace
Every trail near this house is dirt and rock underfoot, which is worth saying to a runner arriving with a road pace in mind. The mapped routes within seven and a half miles carry no gravel and no pavement at all. Expect to give up a minute or two a mile against the same effort on the road, more on the ridges, and rather more than that wet.
The climbs are the other half of it. The Highlands are not mountains but they are relentlessly bumpy: a five-mile loop here routinely carries a thousand feet of ascent in short, steep, rooty pitches rather than in one long drag. That is a different kind of tired, and it is why people who train here do well on hilly races.
The trail finder gives length, total climb and a profile for every route on this map, which is the fastest way to find something that matches the session you had in mind rather than the session the trail has in mind.
Length, climb and profile for every trail
Running here in winter
The season most people write off is the one this ground suits best. Frozen dirt is fast, the leaf cover is gone so the blazes and the views are both easier, and the trails are empty. What you need is traction: a set of microspikes lives in the boot from December to March around here, and the ridges hold ice long after the valley has thawed.
The two things that catch people out are daylight and wind. Sunset comes early behind a ridge that is already west of you, so a four o’clock start is a headtorch run whatever the almanac says, and the exposed sections on Bearfort and along the state line are a good deal colder than the trailhead was.
What not to run
The Bearfort ridge in Abram S. Hewitt and the Terrace Pond loops in Wawayanda are the two best walks in this area and they are not running routes. The rock is Bearfort puddingstone, there is real hand-on-rock scrambling on parts of both, and the consequence of a turned ankle up there is a long, slow walk out with no phone signal to speak of.
Walk them. They are worth a morning at walking pace.
Practical
There is no water on any of these routes. Carry what you need, and carry more than feels necessary in July — the Highlands hold heat in the hollows and the climbs come at the wrong moments.
Parking at the popular trailheads fills on good-weather weekends by about nine, which is an argument for the early run anyway. Nothing here has a staffed gate at six in the morning.
During the autumn and winter firearm seasons, wear blaze orange on the state forests and wildlife management areas. It costs nothing, it is what everyone local does, and a runner moving through cover is exactly the thing the rule exists for.
Phone signal is patchy to absent across most of this ground. Tell somebody at the house which of the four you are doing before you leave, which is the whole safety plan and takes ten seconds.