Hitting The Trails Of South Jersey With Michael McCormick

Mike backpacking at Apple Pie Hill on the Batona Trail in New Jersey’s pine barrens.
(Photo/Michael McCormick)

If you’ve enjoyed learning about cool places to explore right here in New Jersey from my blog, I want to take the time now to introduce you to another blogger who also covers the great outdoors of the Garden State. This week, I talked to fellow blogger Michael McCormick who has a blog called South Jersey Trails. Michael’s blog reports on cool places to go hiking in South Jersey. Since, you have enjoyed learning about natural places to explore in New Jersey from me, I thought you might enjoy learning about another New Jersey blogger’s experiences. Michael McCormick is 33 years-old and lives in Barrington, New Jersey, and here is his story about blogging for South Jersey Trails.

Michael, who graduated from Rowan in 2007, started his blog called South Jersey Trails in 2013. When his son turned one, Michael decided it would be fun to start taking him on hikes. He decided to share his adventures with people, which led to the start of his blog, South Jersey Trails. Michael started his blog after becoming continually frustrated with the variety of trail books that bookstores would sell. He would continually look at the new hiking books as they came out and the books either contained trails that were all up in North Jersey, or they would list the same two or three trails in South Jersey. After being repetitively frustrated with this scenario, Michael decided that he was going to write a book on the topic, but then decided that writing a book would be really hard, which instead led him to the decision of writing his current blog.

Michael says that the most challenging part of maintaining South Jersey Trails is finding new trails to write about. He says he used to be able to go drive 20 minutes away, hike a nearby trail, drive home and post about his experiences. The problem he faces now, is since he already covered all the close trails, he has to drive hours away, to get to the next new trail, and therefore it takes him a lot longer to be able to post about new trail experiences. When asked about the role blogging will play in the future of journalism, Michael said that as the younger generation continues to turn more and more to the Internet for their information, the less they will use print media, which means that blogging will become more important than print media someday.

Michael has hiked a lot of interesting trails while covering this topic. His favorite trail is the eight mile Parker Preserve Hike which is a piece of the Batona Trail, which runs through the Pine Barrens. This part of the trail starts at Route 72 and ends at the tallest peak in South Jersey, called Apple Pie Hill, which on a clear day, you can see both the skyline of Philadelphia and Atlantic City from the top. Thanks for taking the time to learn a little bit about a fellow blogger. Please feel free to check out South Jersey Trails for some great hiking suggestions. You can find a link to Michael’s blog in the blogroll section of my blog.