Marcy and I weren’t looking for a marathon hike (we’d done that a couple weeks earlier, to mixed reviews) and that made the Blue Ridge Parkway a perfect destination. This linear National Park that links the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park straddling the North Carolina/Tennessee line, is best known for the 469-mile two-lane road that takes motorists through some of the Southern Appalachians most stellar scenery. But you’ll find more than 100 hiking trails along the way, the vast majority of which do not fall into the marathon category.

Which isn’t to say they’re all easy.

The parkway rides the Blue Ridge Escarpment, a geologic upheaval that separates the rugged Appalachians to the west from the rolling Piedmont to the east. The delineation isn’t subtle; The Blue Ridge Escarpment includes Wilson Creek, Linville Gorge and several other of the Southern Appalachians wildest, most vertically challenging areas. Granted, not all the trails are a challenge. The 2.5-mile trail around Price Lake, Milepost 297.2, for example, is as flat and pleasant a walk as you’ll find at the coast.

But at Cumberland Knob, Milepost 217.7 in North Carolina near the Virginia border, when you pull up to a trailhead and there’s a sign with a lengthy warning including words such as “strenuous” and phrases the likes of “do not over-estimate your abilities,” take it seriously. Likewise, if the estimated hiking time of 2 hours for a 2.5-mile trail seems ridiculously long, pay it some heed: It could have something to do with the 800-foot vertical drop — and subsequent climb — on this relatively short trail.

If you happen to run into a hiker familiar with the trail, heed her, too.

“It’s easier if you hike it counterclockwise,” a teacher scouting the trail for a school field trip told us at the trailhead. Counterclockwise it was.

The 2.5-mile Gully Creek Trail began with a gentle climb through a meadow, at the crest of which was the trailhead for the only other trail in the Cumberland Knob Recreation Area, a 0.2 connector up to 2,885-foot Cumberland Knob. From here, the trail began a long and mostly gradual descent to its namesake creek. The trail traveled a half mile or so up Gully Creek, a rocky creek with small waterfalls and numerous crossings accommodated by mostly dry rock crossings (wet tread at worst, though the crossings in this narrow drainage could be a challenge after a decent rain. The return to the trailhead was up a series of switchbacks.

We finished the hike in an hour and a half, with a fair number of stops. But I found the estimated 2 hour hiking time reasonable for the novice hikers likely to be taking a short stroll along the parkway. Ditto the warnings: The typical sedentary parkway traveler would find Cumberland Knob’s Gully Creek Trail challenging yet rewarding — both from the standpoint of scenery and physical accomplishment. And certainly enough to whet the appetite for the next short backcountry excursion down the road.

Learn about 33 of the parkway’s easier day hikes in the just-released second edition of “Best Easy Day Hikes Blue Ridge Parkway,” by Randy Johnson ($9.95, Falcon). You can find a list of Blue Ridge Parkway hiking trails here.