Sunfish Pond is a 44-acre glacial lake perched atop Kittatinny Mountain in northwestern New Jersey — one of the oldest, clearest, and most improbable bodies of water in the eastern United States, sitting 1,380 feet above the Delaware River. In 1961, the State of New Jersey quietly sold it to power companies that planned to drain and refill it daily as part of a pumped-storage facility tied to the proposed Tocks Island Dam. A man from Hackettstown named Casey Kays discovered the threat while hiking the Appalachian Trail and spent the next decade writing letters, leading pilgrimages, and recruiting allies until the lake was returned to public hands. The fight to save it became a catalyst for New Jersey’s conservation movement.
The posts below tell parts of that story.
Dam Nation
The urge to tame and control what is natural and wild has been a through-line in the history of American conservation battles.
The Friday Massacre
The lake was clear and full of breath, as it always had been. It was like every other…
What the Glacier Left
On August 13, 1961, Casey Kays hiked to Sunfish Pond for a family picnic and fell in love with a mountaintop lake he did not yet know had bee…