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:
This post ran four years ago after our last significant snow. We rerun it again, tweaked, because the circumstance is similar — for some of us, at least. It snowed last weekend — for some of us — it’s been cold since, and — again, for some of us — a fair amount of snow remains. And who doesn’t love to hike in snow!
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.
The holidays are upon us — and so, too, are our holiday visitors.
You’re eager to show your visiting friends and family why you love living where you do: the outdoor opportunities that make this such a wonderful place to explore. You also don’t want to alienate your guests — or worse, harm them! — by taking them on an outing beyond their capabilities. Fortunately, you can do the former while avoiding the latter with the 10 hikes below, hikes that offer considerable esthetic bang for minimal physical exertion.
There’s a lot of moaning this time of year about the absence of after work sunlight. In the summer, I can get in a 3-mile hike after work. Now it’s dark before I leave the salt mine.
It’s true that if you punch out at 5 this afternoon you’ll only have 3 minutes before sunset, and maybe 25 minutes of useable light total. It’s also true that the issue is less a matter of available sunlight, more a matter of not looking for it in the right place.
