Raleigh’s Dana Hughens likes to stay fit, isn’t crazy about gyms, likes to be outside, but admits to being a “bit of a wimp in cold weather.” She took up running, ran her first marathon — City of Oaks — in November. She’d like moving outdoors to be more of a family thing; Alas, her 8-year-old son Jackson “is extremely artistic & sometimes more ‘indoor-inclined.” Any thoughts, she wondered, on how to get him outside?
Durham trail a mountain biking gateway for kids
Kids in the Eastlake and Capitol Hill neighborhoods of Seattle didn’t have a lot of fun places to ride bikes. Then the folks from the Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance built the city’s first urban mountain bike skills park in the I-5 Colonnade Park. Kids in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan were in a similar situation until a couple of local mountain bike clubs — Concerned Long Island Mountain Bicyclists and the New York City Mountain Bike Association — worked with the city to help resurrect the city’s derelict Highbridge Park with several miles of mountain bike trail and a skills park. And soon, kids in southwest Durham who also have a dearth of places to ride will have some off-road trail and a pump track, thanks to a joint effort between the city and the Triangle Off-Road Cyclists.
News from your neighborhood statewide trail
The emailroom here at GGNC gets inundated with enewsletters, and frankly, most are enews in ename only: most are eblabla. The staff is instructed to throw most in the circular efile.
The January 2010 enewsletter from the Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail is an exception, chock full of news on several fronts. We’ll get to those fronts in a moment, but for the benefit of those of you not familiar with the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, a quick introduction is in order. The MST is a work-in-progress trail that will one day span the state, running from Clingman’s Dome on the Tennessee border to Jockey’s Ridge State Park, where North Carolina gives it up to the Atlantic. The trail is estimated to run about 1,000 miles when done. About half of it is finished, volunteer work crews are adding more monthly, which is enewsnugget No. 1 from this months Friends newsletter:
A weather reprieve, a call to action
OK, I’ve heard enough kvetching of late about the weather. Or did I mean to say I’ve done enough kvetching of late about the weather? Either way, the weather of late has been less than inviting.
However, as it is wont to do, the forecast that midweek called for rain and cold throughout the weekend has changed. Today is now supposed to be sunny and seasonal. Based on the tinge of early morning sunlight I see over the treetops, it appears to be illuminating a near-cloudless sky: Bravo to the new forecast. And since the forecast still calls for rain tomorrow, it’s imperative that we make the most of today and get out and move. A suggestion or five:
The true power of being strong
“What was that!?” a woman in our group asked. It was a question we all would have asked, if we hadn’t lost our collective breath.
The noise had come from somewhere not at all far behind us. It emanated from a living creature, that much I could tell. And it was by far the loudest, most attention-getting noise I had ever heard emanated by a living creature. The ground shook, it was so loud.