Glaciers, outlaws, and the fight to save it.
Roughly 18,000 years ago, the retreating Wisconsin Glacier dropped its load of rock across these highlands as a terminal moraine. The boulders it left behind — glacial erratics, carried from miles away and stranded as the ice melted — are what make Pyramid Mountain famous.
The best known is Tripod Rock — sometimes called “Morris County's Stonehenge”: a boulder of close to 160 tons that sits, improbably, atop three much smaller stones. Some believe early Native people set it as a solstice marker or calendar site; geologists credit the glacier, which can leave erratics balanced just so. Either way, it has drawn the curious for generations.
Nearby stand its companions. Bear Rock — one of the largest glacial erratics in New Jersey — broods over a swamp near the Kinnelon–Montville line and is said to have sheltered Native people passing through. Whale Head Rock, breaking from the ridge like a surfacing whale, rounds out the trio.
In colonial times the mountain lay within the Great Boonton Tract, a large highlands holding said to have been surveyed in part by William Penn. For two centuries afterward it was working land — woodlots, charcoal, and scattered farms on thin mountain soil.
Local lore holds that the Morgan brothers — a pair of Boonton outlaws, or simply troublemakers — hid out on the mountain in the 1800s. The stone remnants known as the “Ruins of the Morgan Place” still stand along a western trail; how much of the legend is true is anyone's guess.
In the 1920s, during America's great electrification, tall steel towers and transmission lines were strung across the mountain — the first heavy mark of the modern grid on a landscape that had changed little in centuries.
When the completion of Interstate 287 set off a Morris County building boom, developers proposed homes on the privately held land around Tripod Rock by the mid-1980s. Kinnelon's Lucy Meyer — the first woman engineer at Sperry Gyroscope, and a local historian and environmental commissioner — and her husband Karl rallied neighbors into the grassroots Committee to Save Pyramid Mountain. (An earlier Meyer campaign had saved a butternut tree thought to be the largest in the state — now pictured on the Kinnelon town seal.) President Reagan honored the effort with a “Take Pride in America” award on the White House lawn in July 1988, and a wave of land purchases by state, county, and local government soon created the Pyramid Mountain Natural Historic Area — roughly 1,500 acres across Kinnelon, Montville, and Boonton, managed by the Morris County Park Commission. A visitor center and the lookout named “Lucy's Overlook” carry the story forward; Lucy Meyer died in 2019, at 89.
The trailblazer
The first woman engineer at Sperry Gyroscope, a local historian, and Kinnelon's environmental commissioner, Lucy Meyer (1930–2019) led the grassroots fight to save Pyramid Mountain in the 1980s. Her campaign earned a national “Take Pride in America” award from President Reagan in 1988, and the overlook on the mountain now bears her name.
“A mountain saved not by a law, but by neighbors who would not let it go.”
From the community
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Pyramid Mountain & Tripod Rock
The Pyramid Mountain Natural Historical Area is open to the public; Tripod Rock is a short hike from the visitor center on Boonton Avenue (Route 511).
Sources
Compiled from publicly available sources; where accounts differ, the most widely documented version is used. Community corrections welcome.
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