Category Archives: Hiking

North Carolina’s unsung Rails-to-Trails escapes

On a sunny day, bikers, walkers and equestrians flock to the American Tobacco Trail.

I love a good trail, and while I’m familiar with a lot of traditional hiking trails in North Carolina (see “Backpacking North Carolina” and “100 Classic Hikes in North Carolina”) I’m less familiar with the state’s rails-to-trail’s projects. I realized this in December when, on a 50-mile backpack trip of the North Carolina Bartram Trail, I suddenly found myself on a 1.2-mile stretch of paved greenway along the Nantahala River. Later, I learned that I’d been on the Nantahala Bikeway, a U.S. Forest Service project that incorporates a half mile of old railbed along the Nantahala River in Swain County (near Patton’s Run, for you whitewater boaters).
I learned this by noodling around on the North Carolina Rail-Trails Web site, where I discovered the Nantahala Bikeway is not alone. In fact, there are 30 rails-to-trails projects in North Carolina encompassing 130 miles of trail. You’ve probably heard of one or two. In the Triangle, for instance, nearly everyone knows the American Tobacco Trail, a 22-mile, nearly complete trail that runs from western Wake County into downtown Durham. In the mountains, there’s the popular Thermal Belt Rail-Trail, which runs 8 miles from Spindale to Gilkey in Rutherford County, and the 4.5-mile Little Tennessee River Greenway in Macon County. At the coast, folks may have spent some time on the 5.5-mile Jacksonville-Camp LeJeune Rail-to-Trails in Onslow County.
What hampers the visibility of rails-to-trails projects in North Carolina is the absence of true superstars: Virginia’s 57-mile New River Trail and the 34-mile Virginia Creeper Trail; the 184.5-mile Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historic Park trail in D.C. and Maryland; or the granddaddy, the 237-mile Katy Trail, which spans most of Missouri. We have no superstars in large part because, unlike in the north and  Midwest where railroad companies have been willing to abandon long stretches of line, the obvious prerequisite for a rails-to-trail conversion, rail companies here retain hope that even their abandoned lines may once again become economically viable. And so, we have 30 projects across the state that have capitalized on smaller abandonments, from the 22-mile American Tobacco Trail to the half-mile Lansing Trail in Ashe County. read more

This weekend: Look for spring, Run for Roses, hike in … snow?

A sure sign of warmer weather: Tuesday, I saw this baby copperhead sunning himself on a log along the Haw River.

North Carolina’s diversity shows this weekend. At the coast, you can look for signs of spring, in the Piedmont you can run a venerable 5K and in the mountains, you can take a hike — possibly in the snow!

Coast

This is about the time the natural world starts to awaken from its cold winter nap — or as much of a nap as you can work in with temperatures in the 50s and 60s. Most people assume that wildflowers such as the hepatica and trout lily represent the vanguard of spring, showing, typically, at the beginning of March. But knowing that spring is on the way is really a matter of knowing where to look. Under a log, for instance, which is where they’ll be looking for harbingers of spring on Saturday at Dismal Swamp State Park. Take a hike, find a log, flip it and see what scurries about. (Salamanders, millipedes and assorted insects will be your likely subjects.) read more

This weekend hike into the past

Wilson!

Hiking into the past: It’s all the rage in North Carolina this weekend … .

Coast

Feeling competitive? Have three friends, at least one of whom is the opposite sex? And are all of you 16 or older? If you answered yes to all of the above, consider about heading down to Emerald Isle Saturday for the Emerald Isle Parks & Rec 4 x 4 Volleyball Tournament. Entry fee is $55, winner gets 70 percent of the pot ($231 if the maximum of six teams signs up), second place gets 30 percent. You must preregister by 5 p.m. Friday, by calling 252.354.6350. read more

Predator! (Or pussy cat?)

Alan stopped dead in his tracks. I nearly ran into him.
“What is that?” he whispered.
His headlamp was fixed 30 feet up the trail and maybe 10 feet to the right. There, two bright green eyes starred from the brush.
We were on the Falls Lake section of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail on a seven-mile night hike, and I thought of the two things it could reasonably be: a fox or a bobcat. The eyes were the critter’s most easily identifiable feature, but we could also make out a rough outline of its head.
“It’s ears seem a little small for a fox,” I whispered back.
“Could it be a bobcat?” Alan asked. Suddenly, we both sounded like Marlin Perkins.
A month earlier, in the middle of the day, I’d inadvertently treed a bobcat on the Bartram Trail in western North Carolina. It had behaved the same way: holding its ground and holding eye contact even as we eased closer.
“Take two steps,” I said, nudging Alan up the trail. Now I was like Marlin Perkins using Jim Fowler as a protective shield. Alan, apparently unfamiliar with the Wild Kingdom dynamic, took two steps forward. The eyes held their ground.
“Take two more steps,” I whispered. Alan hesitated, then took two more steps. The eyes remained fixed.
We were nearly perpendicular to the critter. I flashed the critter from a side angle and my headlamp caught it in a revealing side profile.
“It’s a cat,” I said.
“A house cat,” Alan clarified. Indeed, it was a handsome, healthy Tabby. “What’s a house cat doing way out here?”
“Probably came from up there,” I said, turning and pointing up the slope where, not 30 yards away, sat a spacious, well-lit home, one of many that dot the trail along the 26-mile stretch between NC 50 and the Falls Lake dam.
We stared at the cat for a few more moments, it stared back. Finally, in silence, we moved on.
Such is life in the Wild Kingdom of the Triangle.
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Options considered for coastal Mountains-to-Sea Trail

The Croatan's wet nature requires lots of pricey bridging and boardwalk, such as this stretch on the Weetock Trail.

My idea of a good time when I can’t be outdoors?
Sitting around a big conference table with the head of the state’s largest trail system and a newly minted map.
Wednesday, Kate Dixon, executive director of the Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail attended a meeting in New Bern about the path the MST would take from New Bern to the Outer Banks. Thursday, she took a few minutes to update me the latest developments on the statewide trail, a 1,000-mile work in progress that will one day run from atop Clingman’s Dome on the Tennessee border across the Tar Heel state to Jockey’s Ridge at the lip of the Atlantic.
A little over half of the trail is done. There’s a 300-mile continuous stretch in the mountains, mostly along the Blue Ridge Parkway, and another good chunk through the Triangle. East of Clayton, though, there’s a long dry spell before you reach the MST’s exciting conclusion along the coast. It was that dry spell that Dixon wanted to talk about.
Specifically, the meeting a day earlier had been about routing the MST through the coastal Croatan National Forest, from New Bern east to the Outer Banks.
“The problem with the Croatan,” she said, “is that it’s wet.”
Indeed. You can’t go far in the 160,000-acre national forest before you run into a wet area known as a pocosin, or upland swamp. Dixon traced her index finger across a number of old roadbeds that seemed to penetrate the forest. Alas, her finger would stop in a pocosin or simply disappear into the mass of coastal jungle growth. Another option, which the FMST isn’t crazy about, is piggybacking on a US 70 bypass around Havelock. Not a lot of esthetic reward in hiking alongside a divided four-lane highway.
Dixon threw a curve ball, though, when she pointed out a sparsely used rail line that runs between the Cherry Point Marine facility near Havelock to Camp LeJeune in Jacksonville, a path roughly perpendicular to a trail coming down the Neuse River. A trail paralleling the Neuse has long been considered the route the MST would take through the coastal plain. The rail line came nowhere close to the Neuse.
“How would that work?” I asked.
“We’re thinking about three types of routes to the coast,” Dixon said.
One would be a paddle route, down the Neuse, to New Bern. Another would be a bike route, following the Neuse as close as possible on less-traveled country roads and passing through the Neuse communities of Goldsboro, Kinston and New Bern. The hiking trail would follow a southerly route, parting ways with the Neuse at Smithfield.
Running a hiking trail along the coastal Neuse is proving problematic on several fronts, Dixon said. In spots, especially in the Let’Lones area below Smithfield, the land is perpetually wet. That’s a problem because the public corridor along the Neuse is only 50 feet wide and much of the surrounding land is privately owned,much of it by folks who have been slow to warm to a public trail running across their property.
So instead, the FMST is looking at dropping the hiking trail south of Smithfield to Bentonville and on to the Bladen Lakes area east of Fayetteville. There, it would make its way east to Jacksonville and pick up the aforementioned rail line, where they might be able to strike an access arrangement. The trail would then tap into the Croatan’s Neusiok Trail and head east to the Outer Banks. Another advantage to the southerly route: there’s more public land to run the trail through.
“It’s just something we’ve started looking at,” says Dixon. read more