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.
Today’s 90-Second Escape: Winter Water.
One thing I’ll miss about being in the woods in winter as the season starts packing to leave: Winter water. While the rest of the forest throttles down — the trees stop photosynthesizing and drop their leaves, critters spend more time in their dens, birds head elsewhere — for creeks, streams, rivers its business as usual. Even more so during the typically wetter winter months here in the Piedmont. And what great companions these waterways prove to be in the otherwise quiet forest, carrying on a constant chatter.
Category Archives: Hiking
Get Inspired. Give KIP a buck
Giving money to a good cause is good. Giving someone else’s money to a good cause is even better.
The good cause: Kids in Parks, an initiative by the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation and the Blue Ridge Parkway to get kids and families outside more. (I know, every time I read that — or write it — I think, “Why do we even need to think of ways to get kids outdoors? Shouldn’t we be having to think of ways to lure them back in?” Alas, this is not the case, as Richard “Last Child in the Woods” Louv has clearly demonstrated. Hence, the need for efforts such as Kids in Parks, which among other things aims to makes the outdoors too tantalizing for a tike to pass up. More on that in a moment.
Meetup, get out
Last week, I wrote about finding enlightenment through a race report filed by fellow Uwharrie Mountain Runner Charles West. After doing the UMR’s 40-mile version (I did the 20), he shared 11 things he learned from the race. Most were about performance, about nutrition, gear, tactics. I was most struck by point No. 11:
North Carolina’s unsung Rails-to-Trails escapes
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.
This weekend: Look for spring, Run for Roses, hike in … snow?
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.)