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 or slide show 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 90-Second Escape: Doughton Park, from the bottom up
Content from Doughton Park: From Longbottom Up
Sometimes, you have one of those memorable days on the trail. A day when the sky had just been wiped clear by a passing cold front, when said front has deposited brisk weather that allows stopping but encourages movement, when the transition of season is on display.
Saturday was that day at Doughton Park, the 7,000-acre recreation area off the Blue Ridge Parkway northeast of Boone. Our GetHiking! Quintiles group did a 17.3-mile hike starting from the Longbottom Road access and climbing 4.4 miles — and 2,000 vertical feet — to the Parkway. From there, it was a rolling 7-mile ramble through open meadows, hemlock forests and weathered rock exposure to the return down 6.5-mile Grassy Gap Road, an equestrian trail that explores one of the plunging drainages coming down the Blue Ridge Escarpment.
We experienced blasts of remaining fall color as well as shadowed passages harboring the first snowfall of the season. There was warm sunshine up top; there were also bracing winds constantly reminding us of temperatures in the 30s. And there were cloudless, haze-free skies revealing ridge upon ridge of mountains beyond.
Enjoy a slideshow of a day those of us on the hike aren’t likely to forget.
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