The Mid-Atlantic Highlands of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut form a 3.5 million acre forested greenbelt beside one of the nation’s most densely populated regions, including Philadelphia, New York City, and Hartford. Stretching from northwestern Connecticut across New York’s Hudson Valley through northern New Jersey and southeastern Pennsylvania to near the Maryland border, the region includes forested ridges, fertile farms, pure streams, and reservoirs in the rugged foothills between the Appalachian Mountains and the increasingly urbanized Piedmont and Atlantic Coastal Plains. The United States Congress designated this landscape nationally significant with passage of the Highlands Conservation Act in 2004. In Pennsylvania, the Appalachian Mountain Club, together with conservation and recreation organizations and local, state, and county governments, is developing the Pennsylvania Highlands Trail network from the Delaware River at Riegelsville southwest to the Maryland border and South Mountain, building on more than 130 miles of Highlands Trail already established from Storm King Mountain, New York, to Riegelsville, New Jersey. The network is intended to protect and connect the natural, historic, and recreational features of the Pennsylvania Highlands, create close-to-home outdoor recreation opportunities, link trails including the D&L Trail, Perkiomen Trail, Horse-Shoe Trail, Mason-Dixon-Trail System, Schuylkill River Trail, and Appalachian National Scenic Trail, and help conserve the Pennsylvania Highlands Greenway by connecting undisturbed natural areas and adjacent protected lands. The Pennsylvania portion of the Highlands covers about 1.9 million acres across parts of 13 counties—Bucks, Montgomery, Northampton, Lehigh, Chester, Berks, Lancaster, Lebanon, Dauphin, Cumberland, Franklin, Adams, and York—and has been designated a Mega-Greenway by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
