This weekend, enjoy a feast of North Carolina adventure, with a guided paddle at the coast (in a salt marsh at Hammocks Beach State Park), a wildflower-themed hike in the Piedmont (at the Triangle Land Conservancy’s Horton Grove Nature Preserve), or all things mountain at one of the first mountain festivals of the season (at Elks Knob State Park).
Category Archives: Hiking
Spring along the Eno
Saturday, our GetHiking! group enjoyed spring full throttle on a 5-mile hike of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail in Durham, from Penny’s Bend up the Eno River to West Point on the Eno city park.
Content from Spring along the Eno
The hike was full of the typical hiker bonhomie: catching up with hikers who had hibernated over the winter, learning the stories of new hikers, comparing snacks. It also offered an eyeful of the spring wildflower display that the Eno River valley is known for. After a winter-delayed harvest, the trail was ablaze in spring color: mayapple, fiddlehead fern, toothwort, green-and-gold, speedwell, rue-anemone, Dutchaman’s breeches, spring beauties, periwinkle, American speedwell and more.
Click on the links to learn more about each wildflower. A great local guide we’ve found is A Virtual Wildflower Garden Across Time, which categorizes wildflowers by color and typical date of appearance.
90 Second Escape: Random Spring Sightings
Monday — never an easy time for the outdoors enthusiast. After a weekend of adventure, returning to the humdrum work-a-day world can make one melancholy. To help ease the transition, every Monday we feature a 90 Second Escape — essentially, a 90-second video or slide show of a place you’d probably rather be: a trail, a park, a greenway, a lake … anywhere as long as it’s not under a fluorescent bulb.
This weekend: Learn a thing
Learn your shorebirds at the coast, learn your wildflowers in the mountains. Meanwhile, in the Piedmont you can learn a new stretch of trail.
Coast
Friday morning, our friends at the North Carolina Coastal Federation, along with Wrightsville Beach Scenic Tours, are conducting a Coastal Birding Cruise. The one-hour boat ride, aboard The Shamrock, will explore the marsh and backwaters around Wrightsville Beach searching for shorebirds, from the pelican and black skimmer to (hopefully) the endangered piping plover (pictured). Guides will explain the area’s ecology as well. A great way to learn more about an area you may visit frequently, but likely don’t know well.
This weekend: A bi, a sign, a race
If you shy away from multi-sport races because they often include swimming (and you’re a sinker, not a floater) then you’ll like Saturday’s 6th Annual Wrightsville Beach Biathlon at Wrightsville Beach. If you like signs of spring, you’ll like Saturday’s totally awesome program at Lake Crabtree County Park in Morrisville. And if you like an early season road race but aren’t in early season form, then you’ll like the distractions of Saturday’s Valley of the Lilies Half Marathon and 5K on and around the mountain campus of Western Carolina University.