Monday — never an easy time for the outdoors enthusiast. After a weekend of adventure, returning to the humdrum work-a-day world can make one melancholy. To help ease the transition, every Monday we feature a 90 Second Escape — essentially, a 90-second video of a place you’d probably rather be: a trail, a park, a greenway, a lake … anywhere as long as it’s not under a fluorescent bulb. Today’s…

Sure, it’s supposed to rain almost everywhere in North Carolina this weekend. But that doesn’t mean you need to stay home and sulk. Coast After warm and sun during the week, it figures that we’re looking at rain for the weekend, approaching a 50 percent chance along the coast. So, how about retreating to the dryness of a classroom to learn something about the outdoors world. Like how to supplement…

Happy holidays! Here’s hoping you survive them! If you’re looking for a time of year that’s hardest on your body, you’d be hard-pressed to beat the one that kicked off with pants-unbuckling Thanksgiving and ends with a cold pack on your head New Year’s Day. Think about the damage alone done by the one-two punch of Thanksgiving and Black Friday. Thanksgiving: overeating. Estimates place the typical holiday meal at 3,000-plus…

Sunday, Marcy and I headed over to Hemlock Bluffs Nature Preserve in Cary after roadside flashes of sourwood red and dogwood peach suggested the fall color show was just getting underway. Roadside trees — stressed by the heat of automotive exhaust — are often the first to show their chromatic hand. When they start to go, we grab the camera and head for woods. It’s not simply the color that…

This is Take A Child Outside Week, a week that, for reasons that escape me, we must force ourselves to force our kids outside. Not to sound like an old crank, though I will, back in the day our parents used to boot us outdoor first thing in the morning every day. Then, come sunset, they’d open that door and start yelling for us to come in. That was a…

Monday — never an easy time for the outdoors enthusiast, especially come summer. After a weekend of adventure, returning to the humdrum work-a-day world can make one melancholy.
To help ease this trying transition from out-in-the-Sun-day to Mon-I-wish-I-were-back-in-the-sun-day, we’re running a new feature every Monday, at least during the summer, called 90-Second Escape. Essentially, it’s a 90-second mini-movie of a place you’d probably rather be: a trail, a park, a greenway,…

There are hundreds of miles of greenways in North Carolina. But unless one runs through your neighborhood, chances are you don’t know where they are. Despite their popularity and growing prominence, there is no one single source for greenways in North Carolina. As I’ve mentioned, GetGoingNC.com is working on that; hopefully, in a month or so we’ll have some progress to announce on that front. Until then, I’ll share my…

Last week, we talked about long-distance greenways in the state — existing and planned — associated with the East Coast Greenway. Interviews for that story touched on other long-distance trails in the planning stage across North Carolina. Today, we touch on those trails. Carolina Thread Trail Charlotte area “The Carolina Thread Trail will be a mega project of rail-trails and streamside greenways in the greater Charlotte region,” Dave Connelly with…

I wrote the following story for The News & Observer and Charlotte Observer; It ran in both papers March 8. It’s rerun here with links, and is one of four posts this week on triathlons, specifically the increasingly popular sprint variety. Tuesday: Triathlon by the numbers Today: The growing popularity of sprint triathlons Thursday: Kim Feth’s story: From walking around her living room to finishing her first sprint tri eight…

There was a bit of concern at the end of Saturday’s hike. “I’ve only got 19.8 miles on my pedometer,” said Bob. That sparked discussion among the first half dozen or so of us to finish our six-and-a-half-hour trek. “I hope that’s not what Rod’s pedometer says,” groaned one fellow who appeared to have just enough energy left to walk the 20 yards to his car. Asked a woman on…