31-Jul-2022 -- After attending an Internet Engineering conference in Philadelphia, I’m spending a few days on vacation in the region to the north - a part of the US that I’m relatively unfamiliar with. Of course, I’m also taking the opportunity to visit Degree Confluence Points.
Driving on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, I was immediately reminded of the differences from my home in California: The lush vegetation all around, and the numerous place names of German and Dutch origin (rather than Spanish). After leaving the Pennsylvania Turnpike, I drove along a maze of rustic rural roads, eventually passing through the small town of Mount Bethel, and then crossing a bridge over the Delaware River, into New Jersey.
Like two of the three previous visitors, I chose to approach the point from the West, along the power line access path from Stony Brook Road, 0.62 miles away. The issue here is that - to get to the power line access path - you must first negotiate a rocky, overgrown creek bed that appears to lie between a pair of private properties. This was difficult at first, but once I got onto the power line access path, the hike became easy. I had feared that, in Summer, the access path would be overgrown, but in fact it was an easily walkable doubletrack path. The area was quite beautiful; I saw several deer, and numerous butterflies pollinating the wildflowers.
The point lies about 30 feet into the forest, just North of the power lines. With the tree cover (plus, perhaps, interference from the nearby power lines), I wasn’t quite able to get ‘all zeros’ on my GPS receiver (which shows 6 digits after the decimal point). I stepped just outside the forest - into a gap between the forest and the power lines - to launch my drone, which I flew eastward along the power line access path.
Here is a remote-controlled aerial video of this confluence point.