Lost Brook Preserve & Tenafly Nature Center in Tenafly

Lost Brook Preserve & Tenafly Nature Center

Lost Brook Preserve together with Tenafly Nature Center occupy approximately 380 wooded acres. You will find approximately seven miles of trails here. Oak forest surrounds the trails, Prister’s Pond and buttonbush swamp. While you are visiting stop by the Nature Center’s Interpretive building to get a map of the trails and information about special programs.

Harring Rock

Glacial erratic are rocks that have been transported by glaciers and dropped at a distance (often many miles) from their original locations. Erratic are a different rock type than the local bedrock because it was common for glaciers to flow across different types of bedrock, plucking up chunks of rock as they moved.

In the late 1800’s and early 1990’s, Dr. John J. Haring made sick calls throughout the area on horseback, bartering farm goods for medical care.

He often walked through the woods and along the brooks in the area which would later become, in part, the Lost Brook Preserve. He would meditate near a 15 ton boulder. At that time, the glacial erratic was 10 feet tall by 10 feet around. Delicately poised upon trap-rock, the sandstone boulder was deposited by melting glacial ice approximately 12,000 to 15,000 years ago onto property which would later be owned by the local Jewish Community Center (JCC).

In the late 1960’s, the JCC was developing their property, with the plan to blast apart the erratic. Saved by local activists and financed by a modern medical doctor, Dr. Alfred Traynor, the boulder, named the Haring Rock, was hoisted onto a flatbed and moved to the eastern section of the JCC property, out of harms way, on property which would still later become the Lost Brook Preserve. However, man could not duplicate nature’s positioning of the erratic on its narrower bottom and had to turn the boulder upside down and cement it into place, burying some of the erratic below ground level.

General Information

Trails open daily from dawn to dusk. Parking lot open Tuesday–Sunday 9am–5pm. Parking is permitted on Hudson Avenue. Outdoor restroom and pavilion is handicap accessible but interpretive building and indoor restroom are not.