Island Beach State Park – Berkley Township, Ocean County, NJ
Distance – Over 10 miles of trails here
Type – Big hike is a loop at the end of the island, the rest of the hikes are out-and-backs
Difficulty: 5 of 10 – can be tough to walk in sand
*Entrance fees per car – check website for details*
Website – Island Beach State Park
Open – Sunrise to Sunset.
Terrain – Sandy beaches, large dunes
Surface – Mostly sand, sometimes paved
Directions – Island Beach State Park, Shore Road, Berkley Township, NJ
Parking – Many lots along the park. Many fill up on hot summer days.
Dog friendly? Leashed dogs allowed
Stroller friendly? No, sand would be terrible to push the stroller in!
Benches? Some trails have benches, some do not
Facilities?: Bathrooms at some trailheads
Rules – List of rules can be found here at the bottom of the page
Markings – Some areas
Map – Map can be found at here and hiking map is found here
Description –
So after many, many, many, many years of this blog, I finally visited the last state park in South Jersey – Island Beach State Park! I’d been wanting to come here since I was a child standing at Barnegat Lighthouse on Long Beach Island and wondering where those cars and people across Barnegat Inlet had come from!
I won’t be doing a normal post here, because all of the main trail info can be found in a much nicer format with professional editing as Hike #30 in AMC’s Best Day Hikes in New Jersey (2nd Edition) by Priscilla Estes and the much-more-professional-sounding-and-writing-with-many-less-hyphenated-strings-of-words-because-editors-frown-upon-such-things Michael McCormick available at many local bookstores (may be signed copies left at Inkwood Books in Haddonfield!) or online, preferably at bookshop.org because they support local bookshops, or you can buy one directly off me if you see me around or live somewhere near me in Camden County. Kidding aside, everyone at AMC was wonderful, and it’s not their fault I like hyphens.
It’s Hike #30, starting on page 159, just six short pages after the photograph of Tree Rider.
HUGE thank you to Tree Rider, who went into a hole in the jetty to save my phone (and this post) when I MISSED MY POCKET WHILE PUTTING IT AWAY! Also, thank you to past me who always insists on getting the almost indestructible phone case even though it always seems so excessive.
Barnegat Inlet Trail (see book for details!)
Please note that I posted about 1% of my kids’ shell photos. They were SUPER excited by all the shells.
Whale Trail – about 0.05 miles
A little tiny trail that circles the nature center based on the large whale bones from a whale that washed up in the park.
Johnny Allen’s Cove Trail at the Nature Center – 0.4 mile length, but requires backtracking (see book for details)
Cranberry Trail – 0.1 mile (one way)
I think these are all the cranberry trail, but my GPS gave up and my memory is really bad at the moment for “some reason”.
“Some reason”. Awwwwwww.
Rating: 10/10 – I have to give it this rating or else my children will take me back there and pile all the shells on top of me until I can’t escape.
