If you’ve been driving Raleigh’s Beltline between Wade Avenue and Glen Eden Drive, sneaking peeks into the woods and wondering when on earth the House Creek Greenway is going to open, the answer is June 25.
That’s the official answer. In reality, it should be passable by Memorial Day.
You know you should walk more. The evidence for what it can do for your health is overwhelming; Walking for as little as 30 minutes a day can lower your blood pressure and low-density lipoprotein (bad) cholesterol, raise your high-density lipoprotein (good) cholesterol, reduce your risk of type 2 diabetes (or help you manage it if you are already afflicted), help you control your weight, put you in a better mood. Everyone from the Mayo Clinic to Martina Navratilova says you should walk.
31.5.
It was a mileage marker by the side of the greenway. Having spent last week hiking the Mountains-to-Sea Trail along the Blue Ridge Parkway, I was accustomed to seeing mileage markers in the form of the parkway’s knee-high stone obelisks that tick off every mile. And I have seen them before on greenways, but never with such a high number. Rarely, in fact, in double digits.
This weekend, there’s a walk for non-walkers, a 100-miler in 100 days, and the Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour, two days of film-watching guaranteed to get you up and moving.
Coast
We’re always on the lookout for good reasons to walk for people who don’t like to walk. Such as Sunday’s African-American Historic Downtown Walking Tour of Tryon Palace in New Bern. This ramble through New Bern’s Historic District will cover 16 blocks (a little over a mile, by our reckoning) and 300 years of African-American history in New Bern. It’s estimated to take an hour and a half; lots of short walks with pauses in between to learn.
I love a good trail, and while I’m familiar with a lot of traditional hiking trails in North Carolina (see “Backpacking North Carolina” and “100 Classic Hikes in North Carolina”) I’m less familiar with the state’s rails-to-trail’s projects. I realized this in December when, on a 50-mile backpack trip of the North Carolina Bartram Trail, I suddenly found myself on a 1.2-mile stretch of paved greenway along the Nantahala River. Later, I learned that I’d been on the Nantahala Bikeway, a U.S. Forest Service project that incorporates a half mile of old railbed along the Nantahala River in Swain County (near Patton’s Run, for you whitewater boaters).
I learned this by noodling around on the North Carolina Rail-Trails Web site, where I discovered the Nantahala Bikeway is not alone. In fact, there are 30 rails-to-trails projects in North Carolina encompassing 130 miles of trail. You’ve probably heard of one or two. In the Triangle, for instance, nearly everyone knows the American Tobacco Trail, a 22-mile, nearly complete trail that runs from western Wake County into downtown Durham. In the mountains, there’s the popular Thermal Belt Rail-Trail, which runs 8 miles from Spindale to Gilkey in Rutherford County, and the 4.5-mile Little Tennessee River Greenway in Macon County. At the coast, folks may have spent some time on the 5.5-mile Jacksonville-Camp LeJeune Rail-to-Trails in Onslow County.
What hampers the visibility of rails-to-trails projects in North Carolina is the absence of true superstars: Virginia’s 57-mile New River Trail and the 34-mile Virginia Creeper Trail; the 184.5-mile Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historic Park trail in D.C. and Maryland; or the granddaddy, the 237-mile Katy Trail, which spans most of Missouri. We have no superstars in large part because, unlike in the north and Midwest where railroad companies have been willing to abandon long stretches of line, the obvious prerequisite for a rails-to-trail conversion, rail companies here retain hope that even their abandoned lines may once again become economically viable. And so, we have 30 projects across the state that have capitalized on smaller abandonments, from the 22-mile American Tobacco Trail to the half-mile Lansing Trail in Ashe County.