DAY PACKS bulging with trail mix, spare socks and enough bug spray to outfit an African safari, 18 hikers met at a rural crossroads one recent Saturday to explore a chunk of Long Island's largest natural area -- the 100,000 acres of scrub trees, ponds and salt marshes known collectively as the Pine Barrens.
Stretching across Brookhaven, Riverhead and Southampton towns, it sits atop an aquifer that is Long Island's largest source of pure drinking water -- a key reason conservationists fought hard for a development-free core area that's almost five times the size of Manhattan.
It includes named tracts such as Sears Bellows County Park and Cranberry Bog County Preserve, plus the entire length of the Peconic River. Most areas are open to independent hikers, but for companionship, convenience and security, many outdoor fans prefer to join a group. Each year the Long Island Greenbelt Trail Conference schedules about 150 free, volunteer-led treks in the Pine Barrens (and along the Long Island and Nassau-Suffolk Greenbelts). When the final 15-to-20-mile link in Southampton is completed, hikers will be able to trek 120 miles from Rocky Point to Montauk along the main-drag Paumanok Path. But it already provides an alluring slice of near-wilderness.
"I live in Queens, in a building that has a gym right downstairs,” said one hiker. "So why did I drive 50 miles out here? Because nature is the best stress-buster there is.”
That sentiment seemed representative of the group, a mostly middle-aged bunch of avid walkers about evenly divided between men and women, who had converged from across Long Island for what was billed as a moderate/flat hike of six to seven miles with views of Sears and Owl Ponds, Flanders Bay and an old cemetery. (Other scheduled hikes range from an "easy” two to four miles to a "moderate, very hilly” 22 miles.)
Guide-for-the-day Nancy Duffrin started with a caution about ticks and mosquitoes (listen up, or be sorry later), then set a brisk pace. Her circular route encompassing both sides of Route 24 in Flanders wound along marked and unmarked trails -- sometimes narrow paths paved with leaves and pine needles requiring hikers to troop along in single file, other times on sandy access roads wide enough for four abreast.
Nancy and others offered snippets of local history and suburban hiking lore. But chatter was minimal. Everyone was there foremost to commune with nature -- to listen to the chirping of birds and the whisper of wind in the pines (and perhaps to an inner muse).
Hikes out in the Hamptons have been known to attract an occasional dilettante who whines that she needs to get back for happy hour or asks where the bathrooms are. (The answer to the latter: This is the woods, babe -- there usually are none; humans on most serious hikes must answer nature's call as the deer and squirrels do, albeit with a tad more modesty.)
Sometimes the trail was bordered by cattails and marsh grasses, at others it traversed high and dry hillsides overgrown with berry bushes and shaded by scrub oaks and aromatic pitch pines, whose deep tap roots and rough bark full of corky air pockets help them survive near desert-like conditions and fires as hot as 2,000 degrees. A huge osprey nest looked down on Mill Creek. But there was no quicksand, no bottomless canyons and some bearberry but no bears.
Despite only a brief lunch stop -- with plenty of offers to share extra sandwiches or snacks -- no one ever lagged behind or complained of being tired during the four-hour trek. How could that be?
"You can relax in the woods because you can free your mind,” said the philosophical hiker, who was hoping that particular day would help her cope with the tragic death of a friend the previous week. "Surrounded by nature,” she said, "you can come to terms with the continuum of life.”
