I just finished up my first springtime jaunt into the woods. My family and I were able to get out into a small section of the Long Island Pine Barrens. The Pine Barrens is one of the only protected areas left on Long Island and is a very rare stretch of ground with uninterrupted trees.

A little over a decade ago the Pine Barrens were decimated by a forest fire which destroyed a huge section of the land and most importantly the trees. The pine trees that make up this forest are relatively short trees that do very well in sandy soil — which means that they take a long time to get to full height albeit a squat one. The section that we walked in was not bothered by this fire.

One huge issue that we encountered was ticks. Fortunately this time of year they are not typically carriers of things like Lymes or Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever — however, there were lots of them. Out of the 3 of us, we pulled a combined 10 ticks off of ourselves throughout the rest of the day.

Just a note on the trail. The trail was very poorly marked and we were forced to turn back from the one direction. The trail went off across a road that the map did not indicate. Once I have a little more information about the trail and where exactly we were, I’ll edit this post.

Overall, this was a nice little hike (a 5 mile loop) on Long Island, a locale not very well known for hiking because of the huge population on the island. We have to remember that at its fattest point, it’s 18 miles wide and there’s about 6 million (probably more) people living on the rock.