How many people in West Milford could actually draw you a map of what's back behind the old Jungle Habitat gate today? Everyone has the same childhood story about the place. A grandparent who drove a station wagon through a pack of baboons. A great-uncle who swears a lion pressed its paw against the windshield glass. Almost nobody has walked the property lately, and this fall the ground back there changed enough to matter.
According to the volunteers who maintain the park's own history archive, Halloween 2026 marks fifty years since Warner Bros. shut Jungle Habitat's gates for the last time. That anniversary is worth marking on its own. But the more useful news for anyone who actually lives here is what's happened to the land in just the last few years, because the trail system that grew out of the old safari park spent most of the last decade with an unfinished gap in it. That gap just closed.
What was actually here
For four seasons between 1972 and 1976, the 800 acres off Airport Road held a drive-through safari owned by Warner Bros., the kind where lions, camels, and elephants wandered loose while cars crawled past with the windows rolled up. The park drew 500,000 paying visitors in its first season alone and eventually held more than 1,500 animals across a walk-through zoo and a drive-through range. It closed for good in October 1976, and by the following spring most of the animals had been relocated or sold, many to an animal exchange company that handled the transfers.
What got left behind: tanks, cages, an amphitheater, and ten acres of cracked macadam parking lot, all of it slowly disappearing under vines and second-growth forest. The property, adjacent to Norvin Green State Forest and Greenwood Lake Airport, eventually became part of Long Pond Ironworks State Park, administered by Ringwood State Park. That part of the story is fifty years old. The part that changes year to year is what's happened to the land since, and this year it's different than it's been in a long time.
The connector that finally closes the loop
In the years leading up to 2020, the trail corridor running through Jungle Habitat had a known problem. Riders and hikers using the old Hewitt-Butler trail, since renamed Tapawingo, could get most of the way through the property before hitting an eroded, unsustainable stretch that forced a detour or a hike-a-bike scramble. The Jersey Off-Road Bicycle Association and the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference spent years working through New Jersey's land management review process to fix it, clearing the plan in July 2020 with a list of conditions attached.
Construction on the fix, a connector segment called Stags, started in 2022. Built by the King Trail Alliance over roughly eight months, with funding from Santa Cruz Bicycles, Fox Factory, and Athletic Brewing, it replaced a washed-out section of the old Hewitt-Butler route that ran directly past the property's leftover tanks and cages on its way toward Tapawingo. The new trail did double duty: fixing the erosion problem and becoming New Jersey's first mountain biking trail built specifically for adaptive riders, with a consistent width of four to six feet, a grade capped at seven percent, and no surface obstacles taller than five inches.
JORBA's most recent project updates now describe Stags as complete. That means the detour that used to interrupt a Tapawingo ride is gone, and Jungle Habitat connects directly into the larger Tapawingo corridor for the first time anyone can point to on a current map.
Before crews could clear a single tree for the new connector, state reviewers required surveys for nesting barred owls and red-shouldered hawks, along with a check for archaeological sensitivity on land that once held tiger pens.
If you rode here as recently as 2021, when the trail blazes still didn't line up with the map, the ground has caught up.
Trails worth knowing this fall
The current network runs between nine and eleven miles of singletrack, and it keeps a personality that no other Highlands trail system has, mostly because of what it used to be.
- Warthog is the longest single trail in the network at 2.1 miles, tracing the perimeter of what used to be the parking lot.
- Tapawingo is the renamed Hewitt-Butler corridor, now continuous through Jungle Habitat thanks to the Stags connector.
- Stags is the newest segment, built to adaptive-trail standards in 2022, replacing the old washed-out stretch past the animal enclosures.
- Ryno and Rhinoplasty are two shorter connectors linking the Rhino section back to Tapawingo. Rhinoplasty offers an easier alternative to the rockier original route, known among regulars as Hungry Bird.
Why October, not July, is when locals actually ride
Ride-log data from Trailforks counted 101 logged rides in October, the single most active month on these trails and ahead of every warmer month most people would guess. Two things explain it. The overgrowth that swallows the site's leftover cages and tunnels every summer thins out once the leaves drop, so the parts of Jungle Habitat that separate it from every other trail in the Highlands, the actual artifacts, become visible again. And anyone who has ridden or hiked here in July already knows the other reason: rocky, off-camber singletrack is a different experience without humidity and bugs layered on top.
Hikers hoping to see the property without dodging bike traffic are better off going on a weekday or in the early evening. This is JORBA-built terrain first, and courtesy on these trails runs toward whoever's on two wheels.
The bike shop still holding this together
None of the last two decades of trail work happened on its own. JORBA's Jungle Chapter, responsible for Jungle Habitat and the surrounding sections of Long Pond Ironworks and Norvin Green, is managed by Team Town Cycle, the West Milford bike shop that has sponsored the annual Rumble in the Jungle mountain bike race for years. It's a small, specific fact that says something larger about how a lot of West Milford's outdoor spaces actually get maintained: a volunteer chapter, a local shop, and a state park administration cooperating on land that most people drove past without a second look for the better part of thirty years.
Fifty years is a long time for a place to sit half-finished. What's different about this particular fall is that Jungle Habitat isn't half-finished anymore. The Stags connector closed a gap that outlasted three different generations of trail maps, the leaves are about to drop over ten acres of parking lot nobody's driven a station wagon across since 1976, and the whole property is more rideable, walkable, and connected than it's been at any point since Warner Bros. locked the gates.
If your only memory of Jungle Habitat is a story someone else told you, this is the fall to go find out what's actually back there.
For anyone who's watched this corner of West Milford change over the decades and wants to talk about what else is shifting in the neighborhood around it, The Only Orly Group has spent years walking these towns alongside clients and neighbors alike. Schedule a Free Consultation whenever the conversation turns from trails to houses.
