![]() ![]() ![]() It was bitterly cold, and the Passaic River was at full volume as its foamy cascade plunged into the gaping maw of the crevasse, crashing angrily onto the monstrous boulders below. We set up a date to meet Nick a couple of days later at the top of the Great Falls. You don’t want to take any unnecessary risks. If something happens-you know, if you slip-you want someone to be there. It’s not like you’re gonna slip and fall. It’s wide enough, and you can see your way through. But if you’re with someone, it’s just a little mountain climbing. “It’s extremely dangerous if you’re alone. He knows every inch of those falls and the Devil’s Pathway. He’s the only guy on the job over there at the power plant. ![]() I think he would hand them over if he were to be recognized. But they belong to the guy who found them-they’re his. It sort of changes you, and I guess it would be a good place for a ceremony.ĭo you think that the daggers should be in a museum or a historical society? The priests could have been Greek Orthodox, and the Devil’s Pathway could have been used for some sort of ritual, or exorcism-just because of that name. The Devil’s Pathway is sort of like a sacred place-it takes some doing to get down there. Probably around the turn of the last century. In what time frame are we talking about here? I believe that they were probably used by priests. So what do you make of these daggers? What kind of metal are they made of? The employee had found them in the pool of water at the base of the Devil’s Pathway. Nick knew the operator of the hydroelectric plant, and that’s how he was introduced to the four mysterious daggers. The surface of the lake is remarkably still, just as Longwell described it.” “The sound of water falling is the only sound that can be heard. The Totowa’s height is adjusted by a huge hydroelectric plant there, and I suspect that the pool above the lake has been revealed only because the power plant has kept the level of the Totowa quite low. “I traveled halfway down the crevasse that Longwell names the Devil’s Pathway and saw that it led to a pool just above the lake. The book is written by a man named Longwell, and he describes a crevasse that cuts through the rock to a basin. “A relatively recent book describes various methods to enter upon the shoreless waters of the Totowa. ![]() “I read that the Lenapi sometimes referred to the waterfall as the ‘Totowa Falls.’ And that in their language, Totowa is defined as meaning ‘It is between.’ In one book, in parentheses after this phrase is written ‘River and Mountain.’ I realized that it was not the falls but the lake below the falls that the Lenapi named the Totowa. I don’t have to tell you what the answer was.īefore we visited, Nick told us that he discovered the pathway and the pool at its bottom by doing some research at the Charles Danforth Memorial Library: He said that four old golden daggers in the shape of crucifixes had recently been found in the pool at its bottom. office in the early one winter’s day and asked us to visit the Devil’s Pathway with him. One Paterson native who has explored the Devil’s Pathway is artist and writer Nick Sunday. The only way to get to this lost and forgotten world is through a narrow and treacherous cleft in the rock known as the Devil’s Pathway. There the city ceases to exist and you find yourself in a rugged and potentially hazardous place. It is a world of light and shadow, mystery and danger. Early Patersonians would eventually harness this power to run their mills, but they would never be able to tame its awesome force.ĭown in the pools below the falls is another world. Torrents of roiled water cascade down from the seventy-seven-foot-tall basalt cliffs, sending a swirling mist of spray up though the craggy chasm. Paterson may be a rough and gritty town, but at its heart is the wild and primordial oasis of the Great Falls. In New Jersey, one such splash point is the pool beneath the crashing waters of the Great Falls of the Passaic River in Paterson. I like to think of discovery as a stone tossed into a pool of still water: The waves of adventurous explorers will ripple out from the center of the splash to the farthest perimeters of the pond, then will reverberate back to their point of origin. In some cases, our most intriguing adventures lie not in the uncharted terrain of some far-flung corner of the state, but rather in the oldest, most heavily developed urban areas. Sometimes, just when you start to think that there are no new frontiers to explore, you hear of one in the least likely place you would expect it to be. The life of our state can be said to be something like this process as well. Life is a series of cycles of discovery, familiarity, forgetting, and rediscovery. ![]()
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