For a mid-September weekend in recent years, Warwick Turnpike near the Wawayanda State Park entrance has looked less like a quiet Passaic County road and more like a staging area. Cars line the shoulder past the park office. Runners in reflective vests jog the gravel toward the boat launch lot before sunrise. Tents pop up near the beach for a crowd that's driven in from three states to run distances that start at one mile and climb past a hundred.
This year, that weekend is just a weekend. The Wild Goose Trail Festival, the ultra-distance race Sassquad Trail Running has staged at Wawayanda for years, packed up and moved its 2026 edition to Shepherd Lake at Ringwood State Park. The dates didn't change. The reason it left did, and that reason tells Hewitt residents more about the state of their own park this fall than the race itself ever did.
What actually left
Wild Goose isn't a fun run. The event's headline distance is a 100-miler with a 36-hour cutoff, built specifically to be an approachable first hundred for runners chasing their first finisher's buckle. Around it, Sassquad layers shorter distances so the whole weekend becomes what they call a trail party rather than a single race: panels and a film screening on Friday, then a slate of events Saturday and Sunday, free camping for participants and crews, and a partnership with the nonprofit Bigger Than The Trail, which uses ultrarunning as a platform for mental health advocacy. Participants running the 100-mile and 36-hour distances are asked to put in eight hours of trail work or race volunteering beforehand, which is its own small sign of how tied this event has been to the actual upkeep of the park it uses.
That's the piece that's now missing from Wawayanda's calendar. Not a 5K. A multi-day festival that has historically brought in out-of-state visitors, filled the Warwick Turnpike entrance and the auxiliary gate off Wawayanda Road, and put volunteer labor back into the trail system it borrowed for the weekend.
The reason, and why it matters more than the event itself
Sassquad's own explanation was direct: Wawayanda couldn't host the festival this year because of staffing. The race organizers said as much when announcing the move to Ringwood, and they were careful to thank both parks' staff for helping make the relocation happen without disrupting the event for registered runners.
A park doesn't turn away its own headline weekend because attendance dropped. It happens because someone on the inside ran the numbers on staff and said no.
That's worth sitting with if you live near the park rather than just visiting it once a year. This isn't a story about a race losing popularity. Ringwood State Park absorbed the event without apparent difficulty, reserving parking at Shepherd Lake and keeping the boat launch lot open to the public even during the festival. The capacity existed. It just didn't exist at Wawayanda this fall.
What thinner staffing already looks like on the ground
If you've been to Wawayanda recently, the signs were there before Sassquad made it official. Visitor accounts from this year describe a boathouse posting a same-day boat rental closure with no clear notice ahead of time, and seasonal staff who could answer basic questions about hours but not about which trail led where. Bathroom upkeep came up more than once as inconsistent, which for a park that draws heavy day-use traffic in the warmer months is the kind of detail that shows up fast in visitor experience even when the trails themselves are in fine shape.
None of that means Wawayanda is falling apart. It means the margin for extras, the boat rentals, the fully staffed visitor desk, the bandwidth to host a multi-day trail festival, has gotten thinner this year specifically. That's a different problem than the trails being unsafe or unmaintained, and it's worth knowing the difference before you plan a weekend around amenities that may or may not be staffed when you show up.
The park is still yours, staffing gap or not
Here's the part that should reassure anyone who hikes, bikes, or paddles out of Hewitt regularly: the trail system that made Wawayanda worth building a festival around in the first place hasn't gone anywhere. The park still carries more than 13,000 acres of Highland terrain and over 60 miles of marked trail, including a stretch of the Appalachian Trail that runs roughly 20 miles through the park's ridgelines. The old iron furnace built in 1846, once used to smelt local ore into iron good enough for train wheels, still stands near the junction of the Laurel Pond and Double Pond trails. Terrace Pond, the glacial lake perched on a high ridge that shows up in half the hiking photography out of northern New Jersey, is still there too.
For a fall loop, the marked network gives you real variety without leaving the park:
- Lake Loop (orange) for an easy, mostly flat circuit around Wawayanda Lake
- Cedar Swamp (blue) for a walk through one of the rarer wetland ecosystems in the region
- Banker and Cherry Ridge Road for a longer push into the park's interior
- Wingdam (blue) for ridge walking between Wawayanda and the lake shoreline
One seasonal note that has nothing to do with staffing: the state's posted 2026 swim schedule already had Wawayanda's beach down to a Wednesday-through-Sunday rotation once Labor Day passed, rather than the full seven-day summer hours. That means part of the quieter feel at Wawayanda this month is just the calendar doing what it always does in fall, layered on top of the missing festival crowd and the tighter staffing behind it.
Not every Wawayanda race weekend has this problem
It's worth noting that Wawayanda still hosts other organized races without incident. A spring event built around similarly demanding distances, with rhododendron tunnels and marsh bridges as its signature terrain, runs out of the same boat launch area each year with no relocation drama attached to it. Whatever thinned out at Wawayanda's staffing this year appears tied to this particular fall season rather than a park-wide retreat from hosting events altogether. That distinction matters if you're deciding whether to plan a big group hike or trail outing here this autumn versus waiting to see how next spring shapes up.
Where the crowd actually is this year
Wild Goose runs the weekend of September 18 through 20 this year. If you were planning to spectate or volunteer the way locals have in past years, the address to know now is 100 Shepherd Pond Road in Ringwood, not Warwick Turnpike. Parking runs five dollars a car, cash only, and the lot holds more than 500 vehicles, with the boat launch lot at Shepherd Lake kept open for regular park visitors throughout the weekend. It's a short drive from most of Hewitt, close enough that the festival hasn't really left the region, just left the park it used to call home.
Refueling after a quieter trail day
The upside of a quieter Wawayanda weekend is a shorter wait at the places locals actually eat at afterward. D'Boathaus on Lakeside Road still runs its dock-and-dine setup on Greenwood Lake, with more than 30 boat and jet ski slips for anyone who wants to arrive by water instead of car, and a menu built around its D'Smash Burger and lobster roll that holds up fine after a muddy trail day. For something more low-key, Paul's Place on Greenwood Lake Turnpike has been serving chili dogs and burgers out of the same counter-service setup for over 40 years, the kind of nostalgic, no-frills stop that predates most of the trail races that have come and gone at the park down the road.
None of this changes what Hewitt is on a normal Tuesday. It's still the town with a 13,000-acre state park at its edge, a lake community tucked against the New York line, and a trail network that outlasts whichever race happens to be using it in a given September. This year, the festival just isn't part of that picture, and now you know exactly why.
If watching how a place like Hewitt actually runs, its parks, its calendar, its small operational hiccups, has you curious about what else is shifting in this corner of Passaic County, that's the kind of local read The Only Orly Group keeps close tabs on. Reach out anytime to talk through what's happening in the neighborhood, whether you're weighing a move or just want a local's read on the area.
