The Legends of the Gap

Every dramatic piece of country grows its legends the way it grows moss, and the Water Gap has a good crop of them. I'll tell you a couple — as legends, mind you, tales the old folks told, not history — because they're part of the flavor of this place.

The oldest one tries to explain the Gap itself. Long before geologists talked about rivers and quartzite, the story went that there was once a great lake penned up behind the mountain wall, and one day it burst through — tore the notch in the ridge in a single roaring flood and drained away to the sea. Some tellings tie it to the Lenape word for the region, Minisink, and say it means "the water is gone" — the memory of that vanished lake. It isn't how the Gap was really made, but stand here and look at that notch and you can feel why people believed a whole lake once came blasting through it.

And then there's the one every scenic overlook in America seems to have: the Lover's Leap. The tale goes that a young Lenape woman, heartbroken over a love she couldn't have, climbed the cliffs of the mountain here and threw herself from the rocks into the river far below. You'll find that same sad story attached to high places from here to California — which tells you it's more legend than fact — but the cliffs of the Gap are dramatic enough that this is one of the places it stuck.

Now, I trade in tales, not testimony, so take those for what they are: the dreams and shivers a beautiful, dangerous place inspires in the people who live under it. The real story of this Gap — the river out-stubborning a mountain — is grander than any of them. But on a misty evening with the cliffs going dark above the water, the old legends don't feel so far-fetched. This is legend country. Always has been.