Category Archives: Advice

Tips for an evening saunter into night

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.   read more

Don’t let a closed road ruin your day

We rerun this post, tweaked and updated, around this time of year to help minimize the chances of finding a closed road leading to your favorite trailhead, especially your favorite mountain trailhead.

The winter sky is dry and clear, the temperature cold, invigorating. It’s the perfect weather for a long mountain hike. Then, your car loaded with gear and enthusiasm, you find your travels and day-hike dreams shattered by those two little words on a barricade baring access to the trailhead:  read more

10 of our favorite winter hikes

Today we revisit a topic we first wrote in 2012: 10 of our favorite winter hikes. Hikes that, for various reasons, are especially good hiked in cold weather. For some (at the coast, for instance, it’s the only time you can hike them, lest you have an immunity to squadrons of dive-bombing mosquitoes and an unusually high tolerance for things that slither. For others, it may be a view otherwise obscured by a lush, full forest, or for the opportunity to hike in evergreen conditions, or because of exposed terrain that lets winter’s warming sun shine in. IMPORTANT NOTE: For mountain hikes especially check to make sure the trail is open; many mountain hikes remain closed as a result of Hurricane Helene. read more