This week’s offerings all come courtesy North Carolina State Parks, where on any given weekend (and on a lot of days throughout the week) you’ll find an array of interesting — and usually free — programs. Check out the State Parks curriculum here, and read on for suggestions on how you can live and learn in the great outdoors this weekend.
Monday — never an easy time for the outdoors enthusiast. After a weekend of adventure, returning to the humdrum work-a-day world can make one melancholy. To help ease the transition, every Monday we feature a 90 Second Escape — essentially, a 90-second video or slide show of a place you’d probably rather be: a trail, a park, a greenway, a lake … anywhere as long as it’s not under a fluorescent bulb.
Two reasons to get out this weekend: Saturday is National Get Outdoors Day, Sunday is Father’s Day. And lots of options for observing both!
Coast
You’re 4 years old and a little short on cash. Still, you want to show dad a good time on his day, Sunday, Father’s Day. What to do, what to do … .
This is considered the first weekend of summer in the tourism industry. The kids are mostly out of school, let the family escapes begin. To the coast, for a standup paddleboard or kayak tour, to the Piedmont for some fat tire fun, to the mountains for a mellow hike.
Tonight, proponents of the Falls Whitewater Park will go before the Raleigh City Council in hopes of adding the proposed park to an upcoming Raleigh parks bond referendum. The council should unanimously approve the request. A little background, then the “why?”
The effort to create a modest whitewater park at the base of Falls Lake dam began more than a decade ago. It was spurred in part by efforts to lure the headquarters of USA Canoe/Kayak, the governing body of Olympic paddling. (USA Canoe/Kayak ended up going to Charlotte, which had a shinier thing in the U.S. National Whitewater Center. In 2011, USA Canoe/Kayak abandoned Charlotte for Oklahoma City.)
Herein lies part of the beauty of the Falls Whitewater Park: unlike the 500-acre, $38 million National Whitewater Center, which offers everything from mountain biking trail to a climbing tower to whitewater paddling on a half-mile man-made river, the Falls Whitewater Park epitomizes simplicity. Utilizing the existing rock structure at the base of the dam with minor channeling tweaks, the Falls Whitewater Park could offer whitewater paddling on release from the dam near its minimum of 150 cubic feet per second; thus, nearly guaranteed recreation year-round. Approximately $345,000 has already been allocated by Raleigh and Wake County toward the project; the overall cost has not been determined, but the investment would be overshadowed by the ultimate return.
The Falls Whitewater Park would be at the heart of a rapidly-emerging outdoors playground; it’s addition could establish the area as a regional adventure destination. Consider: