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.read more
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.read more
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.read more
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.read more
Resolve to be more active in 2011 by checking out one of these three events this weekend.
Mountains
Frankly, I can’t think of a better way to get the juices flowing the second week of January than on a hike, a mountain hike. A 9.8-mile mountain hike that gains 2,000 feet of total elevation, flirts with an elevation of one mile, takes in frozen waterfalls and promises great winter views in the Shining Rock area. That’s what the Carolina Mountain Club has in mind for this Sunday when it takes on the Seniard Ridge Loop in the Pisgah National Forest west of Asheville in the Looking Glass Falls area. Because of the potentially dicey footing, trekking poles and YakTrax (or a similar traction device) are recommended.read more