Fifteen years ago I took my first trip to Panthertown Valley, a 6,700-acre playground that some call the Yosemite of the East because of its abundance of waterfalls (19), towering (if not old-growth) trees and exposed granite domes. It was also to be my first try at backpacking solo.
Category Archives: Hiking
This weekend: history natural, history human, stars
A quick sampling of what’s going on around the state this weekend.
Coast
Sometimes it takes a push from our creative side to jump-start our active side. That’s one incentive for checking out Lake Waccamaw State Park’s monthly Nature Journal Hike. Once a month, participants, with journal and pen in hand, head out with a park ranger to explore this unique park 12 miles east of Whiteville in the coastal plain. Lake Waccamaw State Park is dominated by a 9,000-acre Carolina bay, one of thousands of oval lakes that dot the middle of the eastern seaboard — or once did, for many of the shallow lakes have long-since filled in. The lake (pictured) is the subject of this month’s hike, from 3-4 p.m. on Saturday. It’s free — even the journal is included.
Sick of the cold, searching for spring
At some point every winter it becomes impossible to keep pretending I like cold weather and I look for the slightest encouragement possible to go in search of spring. Usually, I can hold out to mid- to late February. With this year’s unrelenting cold I only made it until Friday. When the temperature hit a balmy 50 degrees mid afternoon, I closed shop, got out the the day hikers and headed to Umstead.
Lost, or ‘misadventuring’?
Back in the old days – meaning before I got a GPS – I knew I’d been on a good hike when I couldn’t wait to get home and perform a topopsy. That would be a postmortem in which I would get out a topo map and try to figure out why, instead of going from Point A to Point B, I’d wound up at Q. Nothing quite like that post-hike thrill of figuring out that you should have gone left at the junction just past the beech cove rather than right, which, it turns out, dumps you in the backyard of a rustic type with a fondness for easily-angered dogs and cinderblocked pickups bearing bumper stickers of a laissez-faire theme.
Raven Rock: a splash of green in the dead of winter
Much as I love snow, and we’ve had more than our share so far this season, the attendant cold and gray that often accompanies it gets old after a while. I can’t do anything about the cold, rather than bundle up. But there is a place or two where I can battle the gray. One of which is the Little Creek Trail at Raven Rock State Park near Lillington.