I’m a sucker for a good snow forecast, and far more often than not I get burned. But on the off-chance the current forecast for a major winter weather event in the Triangle holds true, I would be remiss not to share some of the best places to take your boogie board on Saturday and repurpose it as a sled. Granted, just about any slope — and there are lots of ‘em in most Piedmont neighborhoods — will suffice. But for big hill thrills, try these:
Four carrots to get you to spring
I love carrots, crave them. Couldn’t press on without ‘em. If I can’t envision a carrot in the distance, I’m hard pressed to roll out of bed and go for an early morning run or ride, let alone in 20-degree weather. So today, a few carrots to motivate you through the cold challenge of winter.
Carrots (tricks?) for luring the little ones outdoors
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: