Note: In addition to leading hikes and backpack trips, and maintaining this blog, I work for the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources’ Hometown Strong initiative, which works to help communities in North Carolina’s 78 rural counties. Because North Carolina’s 14 State Trails spend most of their time in rural areas, I get to spend some of my time helping people learn more about them.
Category Archives: Paddling
Discover North Carolina’s State Trails
How do you follow an event like Year of the Trail?
You don’t. But you do build on it.
The just-passed Year of the Trail was intended to promote North Carolina’s vast trail system. Hiking trails, sure, but paddling, biking and equestrian as well. Year of the Trail events were held in 94 of the state’s 100 counties, those events ranging from hour-long guided walks on local greenways to three-day festivals celebrating trails across the state. The ultimate sign of Year of the Trail’s success? When the concept was conceived by the state’s General Assembly in 2021, it included $29.15 million for trail development; in the budget passed this past fall, legislators allotted nearly twice that much for trail development in the next two years.
Will you remember where you were on the first Great Trails State Day?
I remember where I was on the very first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970: Standing mid-thigh in central Pennsylvania’s Buffalo Creek, ostensibly taking measurements of stream flow but instead watching the very expensive stream-flow measuring device break its cable and disappear quickly downstream. I remember this more than a half century later because our usually mild-mannered science teacher, Mr. Morris, became wildly animated as he told just how expensive the device, which he’d borrowed, was.
10 Adventures to Close Out Your Summer
Here’s a post we like to run in the waning days of August, as a reminder that while fall is near, you still have time to knock a few more items off your summer to-do list.
Labor Day weekend, which is in two weeks, marks the end of wearing white shoes and seersucker suits. It also marks the end of several summertime frivolities.
YOTT Weekend Trail Festival: A Bit of New England in the Southern Apps
The first time I visited the mountains of northwest North Carolina was shortly after Elk Knob State Park opened two decades ago. Facilities were sparse, trail even more so. But there was an old roadbed that plowed straight up the south side of the mountain, to the 5,520-foot summit. The climb was ridiculously steep and a mile-long — the actual trail that soon replaced it takes twice as long to reach the top, from the same trailhead. But oh, the payoff. From the summit looking north is a 180-degree panorama that you could spend a day taking in.