Last week, we extolled the virtues of basecamp backpacking : that is, hiking in a short distance with your camping gear to establish a basecamp, then doing day hikes from there. You get the advantage of backcountry camping minus the burden of hauling 35 pounds with you wherever you go.
Basecamp backpacking: The Best of Two Worlds
You know why you haven’t gotten into backpacking?
A simple misconception.
When you think of backpacking, you likely think of hiking with 40 pounds on your back all day. In fact, you don’t. If every backpack trip we took involved lugging a full pack for days on end, we wouldn’t backpack, either.
5 Hikes that Fly Under the Radar
Editor’s note: The following originally ran in February 2018. We run it again today because it still holds true.
They’re the best trails you may not have heard of, those hikes that somehow fly under the radar.
You know the ones: You’re exchanging notes on favorite hikes with a friend and they say, “And, of course, there’s the Birkhead Wilderness.”
Trail Days Weekend No. 1: Exploring the Coastal Plain
Up for a hiking vacation? And not in 7 months, but 7 days?
On Friday, the first of 11 Year of the Trail NC Trail Days Weekend Festivals gets underway in Elizabethtown, southeast of Fayetteville. And if you’re thinking, There’s hiking down there?, then you really need to be there. Here’s why.
Ground hog? Spring peeper!
I was walking the Matrimony Creek Greenway in Eden yesterday, lost in thought. Not deep thought, just the kind that never bubbles to the surface unless you’re on the trail.
There was a break in the week-long rain, but it remained gray and cold. Certainly not weather to entertain thoughts of spring. But suddenly I was, thanks to one of the sweetest sounds nature conjures — the ascending croak of a spring peeper.