This late summer weekend the great hiking is at the coast and the paddle festival is in the mountains. Crazy, eh?
Coast
Think fall hiking and you typically think of the coast. But Saturday at 10:30 one of the weekend’s best guided hikes will be at the Rachel Carson Reserve. Sponsored by the NC Maritime Museum in Beaufort, the hike is a rare opportunity to learn about life on this barrier island.
A cold front sweeps through the state Saturday afternoon dropping daytime temperatures from the 90s into the upper 70s in the Piedmont and overnight lows into the 40s in the high country.
Translation: Sunday will bring us our first true fall hiking of the season. So get done what you need to get done on Saturday and reserve Sunday for a day in the woods.
My life of late has been ruled by two pairs of Rs: Radical Reels and Roots Rated.
Radical Reels Tour 2012: Every year, the best action sports films submitted to the acclaimed Banff Mountain Film Festival go on tour. This year, the tour stops in Chapel Hill — tonight, in fact. I’ve written about the Radical Reels Tour and its offerings for Great Outdoor Provision Co. (read that here) and I interviewed one of the filmmakers, Rush Sturges, in this space a couple weeks back.
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 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.
Tradition rules at the coast (a last beach blast of the summer) and in the mountains (kicking off the fall hiking season). Meanwhile, somewhere in between a paddle trip beckons.
Coast
Labor Day weekend, you’re at the coast, you’re looking for something different to do, something to relieve the tedium of frolicking in the surf. Tedium? OK, perhaps that’s overstating. But certainly a little relief from the beach is a good thing. And you and the kids can find it at 3 p.m. Monday at Jockey’s Ridge State Park, when you’ll join a park ranger for a romp over the dunes in search of Tracks in the Sand. Yes, search for the footprints of the various critters who call the park home, then make a plaster cast to take home as a souvenir. Beats a hermit crab nightlight from Wings.