You know why you haven’t taken up backpacking?
Because you think you have to hike with 40 pounds on your back with every footstep you take.
Well, you don’t. If every backpack trip we took involved lugging a full pack for days on end, we wouldn’t backpack, either.
Editor’s note: We run this piece every year around this time. The extra hour of afternoon daylight that Daylight Saving Time grants us means we can hit the trail after work. But that comes with a caveat — and some advice, which follows.
For much of the winter, the sun sets long before we’ve had a chance to enjoy it after getting off work. Now, it stays out later and later, and so do we. Sometimes later than we anticipated.
Note: We like to run this column at the beginning of spring to make your spring hiking experience more enjoyable.
It’s always been a goal to hike the trails less traveled. It’s a goal we’ve embraced with extra gusto over the past two years.
Quick recap: hiking was pretty popular prior to March 2020, it became the go-to source of not only outdoor recreation, but recreation of any kind after March 2020, it being deemed the only safe form of recreation in the face of a global pandemic. While hiking no longer bears that mantel, scads of folks who discovered the joy of hiking over the past two years aren’t going away. And the beginning of spring is when you really begin to notice the increased number of hikers on the the trail.
I was talking this week with Jim Grode, Trail Resource Manager for the Mountains-to-Sea Trail about backpacking opportunities on the statewide trail. We started in the coastal plain (Neusiok Trail, Jones Lake/Turnbull Creek area), moved to the Piedmont (six campsites along Falls Lake and the Eno River in the Triangle), and finally, on to the mountains.
My focus was on the trail; actually, it was on either side of the trail.
I was hiking slowly on a sun-drenched section of trail through a bottomland forest bordering the Smith River in Virginia. It was mid-afternoon, the temperature was in the low 60s and I was determined to find the first sign of spring, be it a trout lily, a spring beauty, whatever. The conditions were ideal; in my mind it was already spring.
My attention piqued when I saw the forecast high for last Wednesday was 65. I believe I drooled a little when I saw it was supposed to top 70 on Thursday and Friday. Despite the fact it had been 11 two days earlier I could think of only one thing.
Spring. Specifically, spring wildflowers.
