I started hiking the Batona Trail today with my dad and some friends. Batona stands for Back To Nature. It’s the longest blazed trail in South Jersey, 50 miles through the Pinelands, and was created by a hiking club out of Philadelphia in 1961. We’re planning on doing it in 8-10 mile increments over the next several weekends, maybe with an overnighter thrown in somewhere. We started at the North end, and did about an 8.5 mile hike past a frozen Pakim Pond. The temperature was 18F when we started at 9:30 and warmed up to about 28F by the time we finished at 1:30. The pace wasn’t too fast overall because it had to account for frequent pauses to adjust layers as we warmed up in the sun or cooled off in the shade. We were perfectly warm once we got moving but any break couldn’t last more than a couple of minutes or we’d start to get really cold again. We even had to eat lunch on the move. There was still some snow left on the trail so it was very pretty, despite all the non-pine trees being mostly bare.
