Jockey Hollow Trail Map (click to enlarge)

Be sure to pick up a trail map at either the Jockey Hollow Visitor Center or the Washington’s Headquarters Museum. There is a small fee for the map. You can also download a PDF version on the Park Map web page here on National Park Planner.

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Length: 2.5-mile loop
Time: 1.5 hours
Difficulty: mostly easy with a couple moderate hills

There are a number of places where you can pick up Morristown National Historical Park’s Yellow Trail (aka Grand Parade Trail), though the official start is at the Wick House, which is where I began the hike. The Wick House can be reached either via a short walk from the Jockey Hollow Visitor Center or by driving the tour road to the Wick House parking lot. To find the trailhead, if you are looking at the barn from the parking lot, walk around the left side of the building and across a field towards the forest. You’ll end up on a grass road and will very quickly come to a trail sign and a tree on which three yellow blazes (paint splotches) are painted. Blazes serve as Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs for you to follow, and three blazes indicate the official starting point of a trail.

Start of the Yellow Trail near the Wick Farm barn

I began the hike thinking I was heading in a counterclockwise direction, but soon came to the intersection with the Orange Trail. This meant that I was heading in the clockwise direction towards Jockey Hollow Road. No big deal, just a little unexpected. To head in the other direction you just have to walk farther down the grass road to a second trailhead. It makes no real difference as to which way you go—one direction isn’t any easier than the other.

Orange Trail intersection

While the trail map uses colors for the trail names, signs in the park always use the actual trail names, so be sure you know them. I mention this because at .3 mile into the hike is a T-intersection with a sign indicating that the Grand Parade Trail (Yellow Trail) continues to the left. A right leads over to Jockey Hollow Road.

Intersection with a connector trail to Jockey Hollow Road

Once you make the turn, the trail begins heading downhill at a very gradual pace through grassy terrain. Ticks love to hang out in low-lying vegetation, so I suggest wearing long pants no matter what the temperature (there are also briers on the trail, another reason to wear long pants). Ticks live close to the ground so that they can attach to anything that walks by, even small animals like squirrels and rabbits, so keep an eye out for them on the fronts of your lower legs. Once attached, they instinctively start crawling upwards. If they can get to your crotch, that’s their game plan, otherwise they’ll continue up to your armpits or hair. If they lived higher off the ground they wouldn’t be able to attach to anything other than Bigfoots and basketball players.

Typical terrain along the first half mile of the Yellow Trail

At .7 mile into the hike is Jockey Hollow Road and a mass of trail intersections that are all located near a parking lot called Trail Center. At this point, take a sharp left towards a footbridge—do not cross the road. To continue on the Yellow Trail you must actually hike to the Trail Center parking lot, which you do by crossing the bridge. Trail signs and yellow blazes show the way.

Footbridge that leads to the Trail Center parking lot

When you reach the parking lot keep straight and walk to the other side. Once there, look to your 11 o’clock position and you will see the trailhead for the Yellow Trail.

Trail Center parking lot

Continuation of the Yellow Trail

Trail Center is at the bottom of a shallow valley, which is why you were hiking downhill as you approached it. As you leave the parking lot you are now exiting the valley and have an uphill hike. As with the hike down, the incline is very gradual and won’t warrant much notice from anyone in decent shape.

Slight uphill hike out of the shallow valley

At exactly the 1-mile mark, the Yellow Trail comes out at the Grand Parade, the 6^th stop on a tour of Morristown National Historical Park. It can also be reached via automobile.

Information panels at the Grand Parade

The Yellow Trail continues on the other side of Grand Parade Road, but you must first walk up the road (take a left) a short distance to reach the trailhead. From here the trail climbs another moderately strenuous hill for the next third of a mile.

Continuation of the Yellow Trail on the other side of Grand Parade Road

A quarter mile past the Grand Parade is an intersection with a trail that connects to the White Trail, which lies about a quarter mile northeast. A sign clearly identifies each path. Stay left to continue on the Yellow Trail.

Intersection with connector trail to the Grand Loop Trail

There is one other intersection before you come to the next point of interest on the hike, the Soldier Huts at the Pennsylvania Line Encampment Site. This intersection is with a connector trail that leads northwest to Sugarloaf Road. Follow the sign that points to “Solider Huts.”

At the 1.5-mile mark on the hike you will reach the Pennsylvania Line Encampment Site. Nothing remains from the Continental Army’s encampment at Morristown except for a few stone hearths. Soldiers arrived with nothing but a tent to live in and had to quickly build their own wooden huts, which was done by stripping hundreds of acres of trees.

Original stone hearth built by the soldiers of the Pennsylvania Line

When Morristown National Historical Park opened in the early 1930s, the National Park Service constructed five replica huts around some of the existing hearths. The exact dimensions were based on historical evidence and post holes that were found in the ground. The huts were replaced with newer ones in the 1960s, and today these are going through renovation and replacement.

Replica of a soldier hut from the encampment at Morristown

When done visiting the huts, walk down the hill on a gravel path towards the parking lot until it ends at Grand Parade Road near its intersection with Cemetery Road. The Yellow Trail continues across the street—look for a large boulder and a yellow blaze on a tree. The boulder is a memorial that marks the general location of where approximately one hundred men who died at Jockey Hollow were buried. The memorial was erected in 1932.

View of the parking lot from the Soldier Hut exhibit

Yellow Trail continues past the Jockey Hollow cemetery memorial

The trail now follows Cemetery Road all the way back to the Wick Farm, sometimes within site of the pavement. The terrain is flat and once again very brushy, which means ticks and briers. Long pants won’t help with the briers since many of them are at chest level. I had brought my hiking poles and resorted to using them as machetes to knock the briers out of the way.

Typical terrain of the Yellow Trail on the final stretch along Cemetery Road

The Yellow Trail does not end where it started, but instead comes out farther down the grassy road that you encountered at the very start of the hike. You can see the Wick barn from here, so just head in that direction to get back to the parking lot.

Second trailhead for the Yellow Trail comes out a short ways from the Wick Farm barn

If you want to see all of the Morristown National Historical Park tour stops in Jockey Hollow, but don’t want to drive, then hiking the Yellow Trail is the solution. Just be sure to park at the Jockey Hollow Visitor Center, which is the first designated stop. You can then take the short walk to the Wick Farm and hike the Yellow Trail to the only other tour stops, the Grand Parade and the Pennsylvania Line Encampment Site.

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