Editor’s note: The following originally ran in February 2018. We run it again today because it still holds true.
They’re the best trails you may not have heard of, those hikes that somehow fly under the radar.
You know the ones: You’re exchanging notes on favorite hikes with a friend and they say, “And, of course, there’s the Birkhead Wilderness.”
Up for a hiking vacation? And not in 7 months, but 7 days?
On Friday, the first of 11 Year of the Trail NC Trail Days Weekend Festivals gets underway in Elizabethtown, southeast of Fayetteville. And if you’re thinking, There’s hiking down there?, then you really need to be there. Here’s why.
I was walking the Matrimony Creek Greenway in Eden yesterday, lost in thought. Not deep thought, just the kind that never bubbles to the surface unless you’re on the trail.
There was a break in the week-long rain, but it remained gray and cold. Certainly not weather to entertain thoughts of spring. But suddenly I was, thanks to one of the sweetest sounds nature conjures — the ascending croak of a spring peeper.
Winter hikes in the mountains intimidate us. Not so much the hiking itself — who doesn’t love tromping through a forest carpeted with snow? Rather, it’s simply getting to the trailhead. The prospect of icy mountain roads, of road closures, of other drivers who don’t know how to drive on icy roads. Why run the risk?
Weekend trail festivals — a weekend devoted to all things trails — are great fun. Trouble is, what trail festivals there are in the area — AT Trail Days in Damascus, Va.; NC Trail Days in Elkin — are few and far between.
Until this year.
This year, as part of North Carolina’s observance of Year of the Trail, among the hundreds of Year of the Trail events are 11 weekend trail festivals. Most will follow this format:
