The Six Weeks When Skillman Gets Its Fall Back
For most of the last two years, anyone driving East Mountain Road toward Carrier Clinic passed a trail closed sign at the Sourland Mountain Preserve lot without much thought. Closed sections stay closed. You reroute, you pick a different loop, you stop checking. Then sometime this summer, the sign came down on the Maple Flats Trail, and the section that had been fenced off for restoration work quietly reopened.
That single reopening is the anchor for a stretch of weeks that Montgomery residents don't get every year. Between mid-September and the end of October, three things that rarely line up all land in the same window: a trail back in service after a long rest, the final Saturdays of the farmers market season, and one week when a chunk of local restaurants put out special menus. None of these are new to Skillman. What's new is that they're happening at once, on a calendar that won't hold this shape again until next fall, if it holds it at all.
The Somerset County Park Commission closed the Maple Flats loop to let a stretch of boardwalk get rebuilt and to give the surrounding ground a chance to recover from years of foot traffic. According to the Commission, the closure lasted the better part of two years, with rangers and volunteers repairing boardwalk sections and signage while giving native plants time to regrow undisturbed. That's a long time for a short trail. Maple Flats is the easiest of the preserve's loops, an orange-blazed path with a modest elevation gain in the range of 100 to 200 feet, running mostly flat under oak canopy with a series of numbered trail posts marking the turns.
If you haven't been out to the preserve in a while, the access point hasn't changed. From the Skillman Post Office, it's about three miles up East Mountain Road to the entrance, with Carrier Clinic on the right just before you get there. The parking lot holds room for more than 30 cars, which matters on a clear Saturday when the lot fills fast. What has changed is that the loop you'd have skipped last fall, and the fall before that, is the one worth doing first this year. The rest of the preserve, the Ridge Trail's boulder fields and the Roaring Brook stretch, never closed. Maple Flats is the piece that's new again.
While the trail sat behind a fence, Hidden Spring Lavender and Alpaca Farm on Route 601 kept its weekend hours the whole time. Marie and Steve Voorhees run the 25-acre farm themselves, a husband and wife operation that started with a hay field and, later, four alpacas in 2018. The herd has grown to 22 since then, and the farm is open Saturdays and Sundays from 10 to 4, with alpaca walks available and a shop stocked with lavender products made from the fields on-site.
One thing worth knowing if you haven't visited since spring: the lavender itself blooms mid-June through mid-July, so if you're picturing purple rows, that window has already passed for the year. What's still there in September and October is the rest of it, the alpacas, the shop, the low-key weekend rhythm the Voorheeses have kept going for years without turning it into anything more polished than it needs to be. It's not a seasonal pop-up. It's a fixture that happens to look best in summer and still works fine in fall.
The outdoor Montgomery Farmers Market runs Saturdays from May 2 through October 31, from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., in the parking lot at Montgomery Elementary School on Montgomery Road. The market skips the Saturday closest to July 4th for the township's parade and festival, but otherwise it's been running the same stretch of Saturdays since spring. The difference now is which end of the season you're standing on. In May, the market is just getting going, with vendors still filling in their weekly rotation. By October, it's the opposite. Every Saturday from here forward is one of the last before the outdoor season closes for the year and doesn't pick back up until the following spring.
That's a different kind of urgency than "farmers market is open," which is the sentence every roundup defaults to. The actual fact worth knowing is that there's a hard stop at the end of October, and after that the fresh produce and prepared food vendors that have been showing up weekly since May won't be back on that lot until next year.
Montgomery Township's Restaurant Week is set for September 14 through 20, coordinated through the township's Economic Development Commission. As of the summer, the full list of participants and their specific offers hadn't been finalized on the township's page, but the dates themselves are locked. If your household has a running list of Route 206 corridor spots you keep meaning to try, this is the one week a year several of them put out a reason to actually go.
None of these four things, the trail, the farm, the market, the restaurant deals, are unusual on their own. What's unusual is that they overlap the way they do this particular fall. The trail closure lasted two years, which means the reopening isn't an annual event you can count on seeing again next September. The market's outdoor season ends on a fixed date, October 31, so its overlap with the trail reopening only exists for as long as both are true at the same time, which is right now. Restaurant Week is seven days out of 365. Stack all three against a calendar and you get a specific six-week stretch, mid-September through the end of October, where a resident could realistically do a Maple Flats loop on a Saturday morning, swing by Hidden Spring for alpacas in the afternoon, and use Restaurant Week to try a spot they've been putting off, all inside the same six weeks that won't line up quite the same way again.
That's the version of this list worth keeping, not because any single piece is rare, but because the convergence is.
If you've been in Skillman long enough to remember when that trail closed, you've also probably watched the neighborhood shift in smaller ways, a new tenant here, a market vendor there, without ever needing an agent to tell you about it. That's the kind of local read Vanessa Shives and her husband Ken bring to the buying and selling side of Montgomery Township too. If a move is somewhere on your horizon, whenever that turns out to be, they're a call away to talk through what it actually looks like from someone who knows these Saturdays as well as you do.
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