Another year, another year of … .
If your knee-jerk response to finish this thought is “… not enough adventure,” we hear you. It’s a common sentiment this time of year. The leaves nearly gone, the cycle of another calendar year is fast coming to a close. We begin looking ahead to next year with thoughts of big plans for the year ahead. And that’s when it hit: “What were our plans for this year?” And what the heck happened to them?
Editor’s note: Every year around this time — the time of cooling temperatures — we revisit some of our favorite coastal hikes. This year, we revisit last year’s list, with a tweak or two.
We generally refrain from hiking at the coast from late March through October. But once Halloween has passed and the flitting and slithering things that give us pause re subdued, our thoughts turn to the coast and some of our favorite hikes in the state. To hikers, this is the region’s real peak season. Pack a camera, a notebook, a handful of nature guidebooks. Camp, stay in cheap motels. Cook dinner over a camp stove, linger over breakfast, eat lunch on the go. And listen.
In early December, we’re doing a GetBackpacking! trip on the 21-mile Neusiok Trail. It’s a two-nighter, with a 2-mile hike in Friday evening, 8 miles Saturday, an 11-mile hike out Sunday. Pretty good distances for a backpack trip.
It also makes for a great day hike — a great long day hike.
Ah, time for a beach vacation! Time to frolic in the sun and surf, read, eat. But, eventually, you’d like to move, right?
Luckily, trails abound at the coast. Below are five trails we enjoy at the beach—and all of these trails are well away from the current blackout zone of Hatteras and Ocracoke.
In 2015, we launched our GetHiking! Classic Hikes program with GetHiking! North Carolina’s Classic Hikes. Over the course of the year we hiked a dozen of North Carolina’s most notable areas: Shining Rock, Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains, Panthertown Valley, the Mountains-to-Sea Trail and the Appalachian Trail, to name a few.
