Patience.
Sometimes that’s the key to exploring a trail. Patience, as in following a trail that isn’t well blazed — or blazed at all. Patience in finding the trailhead. Or patience in even finding clues on the internet that the trail even exists. Thank heaven for friends who somehow found it and hiked it.
We love hiking in winter. Its allure — cool temperatures to keep you moving, dry air, and awesome light, to name three — go largely unappreciated. Still, it’s a time for shorter hikes. Shorter hours of daylight, the rapidly disappearing late-day sun, the cold early and late. It’s a great time to be out, just not for prolonged periods of time.
Another mostly sunny weekend with daytime highs in the low 50s.
In other words, another weekend where you might be hard-pressed to find a trail that isn’t swamped with hikers. And, as a result, another GetOut! column in which we try to point you in the direction of trails less likely to attract the masses.
The Carolina Thread Trail reflects the textile industry for which it is named: Currently, the 7-year-old project is a series of random and scattered threads of trail that, someday, will be woven into a 1,500-mile trail network draping a 15-county area with 2.3 million people.
The weekend forecast, no matter where you live in North Carolina, is essentially this: daytime high of 80, a good chance of rain.
We’ve had a fair amount of rain this year: in the Triangle, 31.58 inches of rain have fallen at Raleigh-Durham International Airport since the first of the year, more than six inches above the normal. Fortunately, though, much of that rain has come during the week.
Not, apparently, the case this weekend.
So what are your rainy day options?
There’s always the climbing gym, and with 14 across the state, odds are there’s one near you. Check out your options at our list of climbing gyms in North Carolina.
One of our favorite outdoor options in the rain: a hike. If you’ve got even the basic gear to keep dry, a hike in the rain can be a revelatory experience. First, though, you need that basic gear; this post from March 2012 gives you that direction.
Then, because some hikes are better hiked wet that others, here’s a rundown of seven of our favorite wet hikes near the state’s urban centers.
