The temperature was around 60, the sky as blue as it gets. It was a gorgeous day for hiking any time of the year, let alone the first weekend of January. And yet … .
“I could stand it a little colder,” Jenny said as we took a short break hiking the Buckquarter Creek Trail at Eno River State Park, our first GetHiking! Winter Program for Beginners hike. Her fellow sun-drenched hikers nodded.
This weekend appears to be a carbon copy (here’s a history lesson, kids) of last weekend: lots of rain during the week, lots of sun on Saturday — and this weekend, Sunday, too. That being the case, some thoughts on how to spend a sunny first weekend of 2019:
On Tuesday’s GetHiking! New Year’s Day hike, I was struck by how many of the hikers had hiking goals—ambitious ones—for 2019. Vaughn committed to five backpack trips in the first half of the year, and Linda was good for at least three. Deb was booked for an adventure in South Africa, and was planning to visit New Zealand. One hiker planned to complete a section hike of the 1,175-mile Mountains-to-Sea Trail.
Let’s say you went on one of the 59 First Day Hikes scheduled today at North Carolina’s State Parks, and, perhaps to your surprise, you — someone who never really considered yourself the outdoors type, let alone a hiker — really liked it. You fell into conversation with fellow hikers that made time fly, you were taken by aspects of the outdoors you never appreciated before, you didn’t mind getting a little muddy. And when it was done — Wow! Did I really just walk two miles!? You wonder where hiking might lead if you stuck with it. Well, here are a few possibilities of what hiking can lead to from the 19 hikers on today’s GetHiking! Triangle New Year’s Day Hike on the Mountains-to-Sea Trail along Falls Lake.
This week’s video is a salute to exploring in the rain, which is our way of saying there’s a lot of it in the forecast the next few days.
But not on Saturday! So, we have three options today: 1) if you want to stay dry, 2) if you don’t mind the rain, 3) if you’d rather wait until New Year’s Day (when there’s still a chance of rain).
