OK, hikers, take a knee! Coach Miller here, and —
Coach Miller! Has a nice ring.
— we’re here to see how many of you would like to really challenge yourselves and help a great cause at the same time.
The challenge: hiking a 28.3-mile stretch of the Foothills Trail in one day.
When Raleigh’s Neuse River Greenway reaches the Johnston County Line in the spring of 2013, it’ll have company.
“It should be done by this time next year, if not sooner,” Bob Mosher with the NC Department of Transportation’s Division of Bicycle and Pedestrian Safety said Thursday.
This weekend’s offerings underscore North Carolina’s geographic diversity, starting with a paddle through a tidal flat at the coast, continuing with a kayak trip down a scenic river on the cusp of the coastal plain, and ending with a southern Appalachians hike on the Mountains-to-Sea Trail.
Sunday, I woke up as sore as I’ve been in a long while. Not just leg sore from running, say, a half marathon, or riding a mountain century. And not the shoulder and arm sore from a long paddle. Full-body head-to-toe sore. That’s what a day of honest work will do.
Saturday is National Trails Day, a day set aside for paying homage to the nation’s more than 200,000 miles of trail. In most cases, that involves grabbing a rake, a pickax, a shovel and sprucing up the trails that on the other 364 days of the year we love to death. It’s a day underscoring that without volunteer labor, our trail systems simply wouldn’t exist. Last year, for instance, 190,350 volunteer hours were logged at nearly 2,000 registered National Trails Day events. That represents roughly $3.9 million in labor that our cash-strapped federal, state and local land managers simply couldn’t afford to pay for.