Here’s our annual note for when the temperature seems too cold to hike.
Tomorrow morning the forecast calls for a temperature in the upper teens, rising to maybe 40. But it will be sunny, and a little sun can make up for a lot of cold.
North Carolina has, on average, 28 clear days every winter; only seven states see more cloudless days, according to data compiled from two climate agencies. Virginia averages 25 clear days. In short, you could live in much worse places to avoid feeling SAD
All the leaves are gone and the sky is gray, meaning it’s time for our annual lecture on winter hiking. This is the tips for comfortable winter hiking lecture, not the why-you-should-do-it lecture.
We love winter hiking. Why? We’ll refer you to this post from two years ago to explain why. Today, as we do every year at this time, we trot out our tips for how you can take the perceived discomfort out of winter hiking, making it possible to better appreciate what to many hikers is the sport’s lost season.
Editor’s note: Every year around this time — the time of cooling temperatures — we revisit some of our favorite coastal hikes.
We generally refrain from hiking at the coast from late March through October. But once Halloween has passed and the flitting and slithering things that give us pause are subdued, our thoughts turn to the coast and some of our favorite hikes in the state. To local hikers, this is the real peak season. Pack a camera, a notebook, a handful of nature guidebooks. Camp, stay in cheap motels. Cook dinner over a camp stove, linger over breakfast, eat lunch on the go. And listen.
We’ve reached late fall, the transition between glorious fall hiking and winter, a period many see as a three-month hiatus from the trail. Why? Well, we know not why: for us, it has become our favorite season to be on the trail. It’s a topic we’ve waxed on at length; here, for instance.
This post ran four years ago after our last significant snow. We rerun it again, tweaked, because the circumstance is similar — for some of us, at least. It snowed last weekend — for some of us — it’s been cold since, and — again, for some of us — a fair amount of snow remains. And who doesn’t love to hike in snow!
