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RIIIIINGWOOOOOD NJ!!!!!

My family lived for a period of time just five miles away across the State Line in Sloatsburg NY (AKA "Slutsberg" on account of it was said to be easy to get laid at the skating rink, two of my cousins met their wives there ). Space is small in them Ramapo Mts and Ringwood is contiguous with the West Point/Harriman/TuxedoPark/Stirling Forest woodlands, actually quite a swathe of habitat just thirty miles from NYC. New Jersey's only bear fatality occurred in 2014 in nearby Milford State park when a Dot Indian Grad Student ran from and was killed by a big black bear. My cousin who is more like my brother is from Sloatsburg and used to take six or seven deer every year up the hill right in back of his house (ate them too). In high school and college I used to walk all over those mountains, but never as far south as Ringwood.

Ringwood is also part of the traditional home of the Jackson-Whites, a remnant mixed Indian/White/Black people indigenous to the Ramapos. If them fighting chickens in that old mine building ain't owned by Mexicans, then prob'ly by Jackson-Whites. Regardless, if everybody in that video got quiet, they could prob'ly hear the traffic on I 87, the NY State Thruway

A pretty good article on the Jackson-Whites here, which term has since apparently become racist... Mr Dennison was in trouble; a handgun in New Jersey, even worse, loaded with hollowpoints, a felony in that State Later that same day, one of the NJ Park Rangers shot and killed a guy.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/03/01/strangers-on-the-mountain

Most of the Ramapo Mountain woodlands, extending from Pompton Lakes, south of Mahwah, up to West Point, on the Hudson River, are now preserved as parks, where A.T.V.s are prohibited. But Stag Hill has traditionally been left alone, and blazed hiking trails steer clear of the residences by at least a mile in any direction. Dennison brought a switchblade with him, as well as a .22-calibre handgun, which he kept in a holster on his right side. He planned to take some target practice at one of the abandoned cars nearby, or, if he got lucky, to bag a deer or a wild turkey or some smaller game. “Basically, he was doing what every American kid does: go out in the woods and shoot off a couple of rounds,” his lawyer later argued. “It’s as American as apple pie.” Not in New Jersey. Dennison, a married man in his late fifties, soon ran into three park rangers, two men and a woman, who had wandered out of their jurisdiction during an “area familiarization” patrol, conducted on A.T.V.s of their own. They stopped him, and discovered that the handgun, for which he had no license, was loaded with hollow-point bullets, sometimes known as “cop killers.”.....

.......“Mountain people” is a euphemism for what locals used to call “Jackson Whites”—a racial slur that the referents equate with the word “[bleep].” They call themselves Ramapough Mountain Indians, or the Ramapough Lenape Nation, using an old Dutch spelling for the name of the river that cuts through the Hudson and North Jersey Highlands, although suburban whites tend to think of them as racially indeterminate clansfolk. The Ramapoughs number a few thousand, marry largely among themselves, and are concentrated in three primary settlements: on and around Stag Hill, in Mahwah; in the village of Hillburn, New York, in the hollow below Stag Hill’s northern slope; and, west of Stag Hill, in Ringwood, New Jersey, in the remains of an old iron-mining complex. The settlements span two states and three counties—a circumstance with socially marginalizing consequences—but they are essentially contiguous if you travel through the woods, by foot or A.T.V....

A grand jury in Hackensack eventually indicted Chad Walder, the park ranger who shot Emil Mann, for reckless manslaughter—the first time an officer of the law had faced such a serious charge in Bergen County since 1991. “You almost feel sorry for the man,” Roger De Groat, a plaintiff in the environmental suit, told me one afternoon when I visited him in Ringwood. “I think they were scared, didn’t know how to handle the situation. You walk up to people, you have to do it right. Tell ’em, ‘You know, you can’t be here, and you have to leave.’ Don’t go up there all loud and stupid in front of somebody’s kids.” He shook his head. “I’m surprised more people didn’t get killed up there that day, boy.”

De Groat is a tall, genial, sixty-year-old man with silver hair and a prominent nose. He lives more than half a mile from the closest main road, near a concrete remnant of the hoist house from the Peters Mine, which was first dug around 1740 and eventually grew to seventeen levels, extending nearly two thousand feet below the ground.


Thanks for the video