Category Archives: Hiking

GetOut! Your Friday Nudge for Weekend Adventure


It’s looking like another one-day weekend. The forecast: Saturday: cold and dry; Sunday: cold and wet.

  • Cox Mountain Hike, Saturday, 1:30 p.m., Eno River State Park, Durham. Watch the accompanying video — see the hillier sections? Those are from the Cox Mountain Trail, the very same Cox Mountain trail that’s the focus of this 4- to 5-mile hike. Learn more and sign up here.
  • Hike to Tory’s Den, Saturday, 1 p.m., Hanging Rock State Park, Danbury. New to this hiking thing and not sure you can hike very far, but still want some great scenery and you want it pretty much to yourself? (Boy, you’re demandy!) You can have it all on this half-mile round-trip hike on one of the lesser-visited, but still scenically awesome, trails at Hanging Rock. Learn more and sign up here.
  • Wildings: Winter Wing Watching, Saturday 10 a.m., Weymouth Woods State Natural Area, Southern Pines. Remember when “wilding” was a bad thing done by juvenile hoodlums? Well, it’s practiced differently down in Southern Pines, where this wilding also features youths (ages 6 to 10), but involves them quietly watching birds. Learn more and sigh up here. 

As always, you can find more opportunities this weekend here:

  • North Carolina State Parks have a variety of adventures planned for the weekend. Check those options here.
  • North Carolina Environmental Education Centers has an extensive calendar of what’s happening at its affiliates; check it out here.
  • You can also find more adventures right here, at GetGoingNC.com

What we’re up to

Here are highlights of what GetHiking! and GetBackpacking! are up to this weekend:

  • GetBackpacking! Everything from Getting Started to Going Ultralight, Saturday, 1-2:30 p.m., Great Outdoor Provision Co., Raleigh. Join our GetBackpacking! braintrust for an all-encompassing discussion of all things backpacking, from how to get started to how to drop a pound or two. Learn more and sign up here.
  • GetHiking! at Raven Rock State Park, Saturday, 10 a.m., Raven Rock State Park, Lillington. A 5.4-mile hike on the Campbell Creek Trail with a side trip to Lanier Falls. Learn more and sign on here.
  • GetHiking! at Hanging Rock State Park, Saturday, 11 a.m., Hanging Rock State Park, Danbury. One rockin’ hike as we visit House, Wolf and Hanging rocks on this 5.5 miler. Learn more and sign up here.

Live the video

If you’re inspired by today’s video, learn more about exploring Eno River State Park, here. read more

Warm up to the Cold 

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. read more

Become a hiker in 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. read more