Memorial Day/Birthday Camping Trip

David and I went camping this past weekend to celebrate my birthday, and it was amazing.

My first stop was to the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. Driving through, I encountered a snapping turtle crossing the road. I also saw water snakes, a garter snake, painted turtles, frogs and probably the most amazing thing was this:

I think this is a crab spider....and it's trying to eat an inchworm. Pure awesome-ness.

After that I met up with David and we drove up to the School of Conservation at Stoke State Forest, in Sandyston, NJ. It's a field resource station owned by Montclair State University, and a lot of professors do research there. I've done a few small scale research projects myself there for some different classes. I ran into a doctoral student at Montclair that I know, Paola, and she was there to collect treefrogs, so David and I accompanied her that night. She caught two northern grey treefrogs.

The next day we went to High Point State Park. On the way there I encountered another snapping turtle crossing the road. I was super excited to discover once we got to the High Point Monument that the obelisk was not closed for renovation anymore, and we could climb 291 steps to the top of the obelisk. The view was breath taking!

Our next stop was to the Mountaintop Road Fossil Beds to go fossil hunting. We had trouble finding the described "outcrops of shale and light colored rocks on the ground" that were supposed to have fossils. I managed to find a large chunk of shale sticking out of the ground, and David was able to hit it against another rock to cleave it along a seam, and WE FOUND FOSSILS!!!

Later that afternoon we were exploring around the School of Conservation, and we stumbled upon two turtles who appeared to had just finished laying eggs.

And then I stumbled upon THIS:

The skeleton of some sort of canine... AWESOME!

The next day (my birthday!) we went to Tillman Ravine Nature Preserve and hiked along the stream, and then went to see Buttermilk Falls.

Buttermilk Falls

All of this in the good ol' state of New Jersey- it's not just smelly factories and guidos at the boardwalk!