A large portion of this range is included in High Mountain Park Preserve, offering miles of hiking trails with vistas overlooking New Jersey and New York City.

The peaks of the Preakness Range, the highest of the Watchung Mountains, shelter endangered ecosystems, including perched wetlands and rare trap rock glade communities.

Preakness appears to be a modernized form of per-ukunees, a Lenape term thought to mean young buck.

[9] For most of modern history the Preakness Range remained a wilderness providing recreation to the inhabitants of surrounding towns.

Only the southern section of the range was particularly built up, with William Paterson University acting as buffer to hold back development from encroaching northward across the main ridge of Preakness Mountain.

[13] The Preakness Range may be the most environmentally sensitive section of the Watchungs, hosting a variety of ecologically diverse areas of wilderness.

The New Jersey National Heritage Program has given the Preakness Range a rating of B2, meaning it has priority as a site with very high biodiversity significance.