Seen any woodchucks in these woods? The cache is a bigger micro-sized container hidden in an evergreen tree. Bring your own pen! The container cannot hold travel bugs, geocoins, or swag.
This geocache brings you to Lenape Woods East, which some online maps show as the Lenape Woods Nature Preserve. Be careful! Atlantic Highlands has 2 Lenape Woods parks. The other is Lenape Woods West, which some maps show as Lenape Woods Greenway Municipally Open Space. Despite their names, the two parks are NOT physically connected!
Congrats to Mazzystarz on the FTF!
About the Lenape People
The name of this nature preserve comes from the Native Americans. In eastern Monmouth County, they were called the Navesinks and were part of Lenape society. Their legacy covers the development of the bow & arrow for more effective hunting and pottery vessels for more efficient cooking and storage of plant foods. Their traditional food-getting activities, such as hunting, gathering, fishing, and harvesting of shellfish was supplemented by growing plants likes maize, squash, and beans.
Early Europeans & the Lenape
The earliest general reference to land in present-day Lenape Woods comes from Robert Juet, a ship’s officer on Henry Hudson’s 3rd voyage to find a northeast passage to the Orient. In September 1609, as Hudson’s ship, the Half Moon, entered Sandy Hook Bay, Juet noted in his journal that “. . . to the northward off us we saw high hills….This is a very good land to fall with, and a pleasant land to see.”
In March 1664, a group of European businessmen wanted to purchase land in the Bayshore region to establishment new European settlements. They negotiated and signed a deed with several Lenape elders, including Popamora, for lands that covered the entire Navesink peninsula from Keansburg to the Navesink River. In return for 35-square miles of coastal land, the Navesinks received wampum and goods including 5 coats, 1 gun, 12 lbs of tobacco, and 10 gallons of liquor.
Origin of the Nature Preserve
From the 1950s through the mid-90s, lands around Lenape Woods East and West were used as illegal dumping grounds for everything from glass bottles to refrigerators. Threat of development in the mid-90s inspired groups of concerned citizens from Middletown, Highlands, and Atlantic Highlands to band together to preserve these woods forever. By the end of 1997, the Atlantic Highlands had purchased tracts that created Lenape Woods East, a.k.a. the Lenape Woods Nature Preserve.