Every year around this time we rerun the following post about night hiking, with a few tweaks. Granted, we don’t switch back to Standard Time for another week (Sunday, Nov. 2 this year), but it doesn’t hurt to plan ahead. That said, we make our annual case for a night hike, and offer some tips on how to make it happen.
Category Archives: Night
Grab a torch, it’s time for a night hike
At the beginning of September we extolled the virtues of a passeggiata— an after-dinner stroll around the neighborhood. Good for digestion, good for winding down after a stressful day, good for getting to know your immediate surroundings. Besides, with daylight becoming more scarce it was a sensible option for getting out.
Embrace the dark, with a night hike
It’s happening, people! Starting this Sunday, that dwindling daylight will sharply ratchet back an hour. So, while you might be able to sneak in a quick hike after work this evening before the sun sets at 6:19 p.m., next week you’ll be hard pressed to hike before the 5:12 p.m. sunset.
Sunday we fall back; here’s how to cope
On Sunday, we turn our clocks back one hour as we leave Daylight Saving Time. That means we will no longer have the extra hour of end-of-day sunlight we’ve enjoyed since March 12. On Saturday, sunset in the Raleigh area is at 6:17:55 p.m.; on Sunday, when we switch back to Standard Time, it’s at 5:16:59 p.m. Poof! Just like that.
Enjoy the solitude of a night hike
The following first ran in October 2018. It appears here with tweaks and updates.
It was a late November night in the late 1990s and Alan and I were hiking a stretch of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail along Falls Lake. Though we’d been mountain biking at night for two or three years, the notion of hiking in the dark had only recently occurred to us. Making our way through the woods in the quiet of night made us a bit giddy; instead of two guys in their late 40s, we were like a couple of 10-year-olds who’d snuck out of our bedroom windows on a clandestine adventure.