The temperature was around 60, the sky as blue as it gets. It was a gorgeous day for hiking any time of the year, let alone the first weekend of January. And yet … .
“I could stand it a little colder,” Jenny said as we took a short break hiking the Buckquarter Creek Trail at Eno River State Park, our first GetHiking! Winter Program for Beginners hike. Her fellow sun-drenched hikers nodded.
This weekend appears to be a carbon copy (here’s a history lesson, kids) of last weekend: lots of rain during the week, lots of sun on Saturday — and this weekend, Sunday, too. That being the case, some thoughts on how to spend a sunny first weekend of 2019:
Let’s say you went on one of the 59 First Day Hikes scheduled today at North Carolina’s State Parks, and, perhaps to your surprise, you — someone who never really considered yourself the outdoors type, let alone a hiker — really liked it. You fell into conversation with fellow hikers that made time fly, you were taken by aspects of the outdoors you never appreciated before, you didn’t mind getting a little muddy. And when it was done — Wow! Did I really just walk two miles!? You wonder where hiking might lead if you stuck with it. Well, here are a few possibilities of what hiking can lead to from the 19 hikers on today’s GetHiking! Triangle New Year’s Day Hike on the Mountains-to-Sea Trail along Falls Lake.
We take a slightly different tack this week. We know a lot of you have time off and might be looking for an outdoor adventure or two from your out-of-town guests. Or an adventure just for you.
Here are some resources that will hopefully help you find the adventure you want:
To hike, or not to hike. That was the question Monday upon waking to see that not only were Sunday’s 11 inches of snow still on the ground, but Mother Nature was adding another two. The second hike in our Tuesday Night Hikes series was scheduled for the next evening, on a stretch of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail along Falls Lake; looking out the window, I wondered if we could pull if off.
