The geology of the Kittatinny Ridge — the hard quartzite spine that makes this the high country of NJ.
As we climb, it's worth knowing what you're climbing. This whole long, straight mountain is the Kittatinny Ridge, and it's made of a rock called quartzite — sandstone squeezed and cooked until it turned nearly as hard as glass. All around it, over millions of years, the softer rock wore down and washed away, but this tough quartzite spine refused to erode — so it's left standing high above everything, a great stone wall running for miles down the edge of the state.
That's the whole reason there's a High Point at all: it's simply the highest knob on the hardest, most stubborn rock around. The same ridge carries the Appalachian Trail along its crest — so as you drive, you're paralleling hikers walking the spine of the eastern mountains, from Georgia to Maine. You just get to do it the easy way.
Photo: JackTheVicar · CC BY-SA 3.0
