Mount Beacon Hiking Trail: "Howard's Path"

One of the best hiking trails on Mount Beacon is unmarked and little used. It is "Howard's Path"--so named after the cabin owner who created it to get to his mountain retreat in the early 1900s. The trail traverses the west face of the mountain, starting near the ancient radio-aerial towers (to the left of the Powerhouse ruins) and running north along the mountain until it comes out by the Mount Beacon Reservoir.

Along the trail you will see the ruins of some of the cottages once accessed there by Howard's Path. In the heyday of the Mount Beacon Incline--from the early 1900s to the late 1920s--the cottage colony on Mount Beacon was a bustling, seasonal community of about 20 families. The Incline Railway made cottage life on the mountain possible, delivering by trolley car everything from the lumber to build the cabins to the summer guests themselves. Some of these owners gave their cabins whimsical names like New Jersey Senator Stuhr's cottage "Sans Souci," or the Weltons (mother and daughter) tandem cottages "Kamp Upanuff" and "Up-Hi-Er." Today only one cottage along the path remains and that has been heavily vandalized. However, hikers still can walk along Howard's Path and see the ruins of a half dozen cottages, with their quaint rockeries still coming into seasonal bloom amongst the mountain laurel.