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:
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.
We’ve had two weeks of gorgeous fall weather, which makes a hiker think of just one thing: a hike in the mountains. Alas, that’s not as easy as it’s been in the past.
The mountains of Western North Carolina in particular continue the long road to recovery from Hurricane Helene. But progress is being made: more than 600 roads already have been reopened by N.C. Department of Transportation crews and contractors, including I-40 near Old Fort and in downtown Asheville; I-26 in Henderson and Polk counties; U.S. 221, U.S. 321 and U.S. 421 in the Boone area; and, U.S. 70 and U.S. 25 in Asheville. DOT reports, as of Tuesday, that nearly 600 roads remain closed, and in some areas traffic on roads that are open is restricted to recovery efforts. Also as of Tuesday, about 13,000 residents remained without power.
Brent Laurenz, executive director of the Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, pretty much summed up the situation in Western North Carolina in an email sent to the Friends group earlier this week:
“In the coming weeks and months, we will be surveying the trail and assessing damage, but trail restoration is a very low priority in light of the ongoing humanitarian crisis facing western North Carolina … it is likely that sections of the trail will remain closed for a significant length of time.”
Wondering where you might be able to hike in the mountains this weekend?
Nowhere. At least not in North Carolina and southwestern Virginia. For one, you’d be hard-pressed to find a trail that’s passable. More on that in a sec.
The main reason you shouldn’t hike in the mountains this weekend: You’ll only be in the way.
