The Pine Barrens cover more than a million acres of southern New Jersey, a flat, sandy wilderness of pitch pine, scrub oak and cedar swamps in the most densely populated state in America. This stop lies on its northern edge, near Browns Mills and the military base at Fort Dix, in a landscape of sand roads, tea-coloured streams and small lakes.
The water here is the colour of strong tea, stained by iron and tannins from the cedar swamps, and it is clean, soft and slightly acidic. At Whitesbog, near Browns Mills, Elizabeth White and a government botanist developed the first cultivated blueberries in the early twentieth century, and the restored village is open to visitors. Cranberry bogs are still harvested in autumn, flooded so that the floating berries can be gathered.
The Pine Barrens are also home to the Jersey Devil, a winged creature with hooves and a forked tail, said to have been born to a Mrs Leeds in the eighteenth century and to haunt the forests ever since. Locals tell the story with a straight face.
For a swim, the lakes of the Pine Barrens are cool and dark, and some state forest lakes have designated swimming areas in summer, such as Atsion Lake in Wharton State Forest, to the south. Swim only in designated areas, as the streams can be deep and the bottoms soft.
On a bike the Pines are hypnotic rather than technical: long, empty, dead-flat roads through endless pitch pine, with the occasional cranberry bog flashing silver through the trees. Many side roads are soft white sand, which will humble anything on road tyres. Fill up in Browns Mills or another edge town, because the interior has very little, and expect greenhead flies in midsummer that bite through denim.