Brent Laurenz, executive director of the Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, pretty much summed up the situation in Western North Carolina in an email sent to the Friends group earlier this week:
“In the coming weeks and months, we will be surveying the trail and assessing damage, but trail restoration is a very low priority in light of the ongoing humanitarian crisis facing western North Carolina … it is likely that sections of the trail will remain closed for a significant length of time.”
This past weekend GetBackpacking! set an SKT — Slowest Known Time. In this case, the Slowest Known Time for a lunch break on a backpacking trip.
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Before we set out Saturday morning from our campsite at Yellow Mountain Gap on the Appalachian Trail, I outlined the morning plan. “We’ve got a long climb — 900 vertical feet in 1.7 miles — up to Little Hump Mountain. We’ll take a break there. Then head on to Hump Mountain for lunch.”
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.
