This cache is part of the Kittatinny Valley State Park Interpretive Geo-trail, created to highlight the natural and historic features of the park through the family-friendly sport of geocaching.
YMCA CAMP WAWAYANDA
In 1901 Camp Wawayanda was founded by Charles C. Scott on Wawayanda Lake in northern Sussex County, NJ. This property was sold in 1917 which made it necessary to find a new site for the camp. A suitable property (now KVSP) was found in Andover, NJ and Camp Wawayanda was relocated. This new site offered a natural lake (New Wawayanda Lake, now Lake Aeroflex) one mile long and a quarter mile wide, 330 acres of forest land, and an open campus bordering the lake. For 35 years, thousands of boys enjoyed the YMCA camping experience offered at Andover. In 1954, due to the encroachment of commercial enterprise, the Andover site was sold.
Considerable physical evidence of the recreational facilities, which the State Y.M.C.A. Camp for Boys developed around New Lake Wawayanda, still survives. A row of platform tents along the roadway was replaced in 1933 by age-group cabin villages. There are also the remains of boat docks, the Hird Swimming Dock, the chimney of a carpentry shop, the concrete foundation of the 1919 Dining Lodge (which burned down on November 11, 1957), and the stone foundation and walls of the Outpost Memorial Lodge, constructed in 1947 to honor 748 former campers who served in World War II, twenty-eight of whom lost their lives. The landscape still bears the imprints of an open-air amphitheater for Ring Games and Council events, a rifle range, horseback riding facilities, Council Rings, athletic fields, roadways and plantings, and Kilborne Chapel, an out-of-doors stage and seating arrangement for religious services, built in 1926. The camp flagpole, the supporting posts for a totem pole, and a small stone-lined fishpond, also survive.