Clingman's Dome Archives - GetGoing NC!

Summer hiking: beat the heat

JoeMiller — Wed, 06 Aug 2014 14:24:09 +0000

One way to beat the summer heat: hike as high as possible. In the case of the Shining Rock area, that would be between 5,000 and about 6,200 feet.

As we enter August, those among us who eschew putting foot to trail in hot weather start getting a little anxious. It was OK back in mid-June; there were other, largely water-based pursuits to keep us occupied: paddling the canoe, kayak or standup paddleboard, surfing, just lolling in the surf.
Now, even though it’s still hot, we’re missing the trail. Must we wait until the end of September to renew our love of hiking?
No. You do have options. You need trails that either work with their surroundings or you need to know when exactly to hike.
A while back, we assembled a list of 10 mountain hikes especially suitable for summer. Those hikes are:

Shuckstack/Lost Cove/Lakeshore Loop, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, 11.6 miles (Trip No. 21 “Backpacking North Carolina”).
Harper Creek/North Harper Creek Loop, 13.6-mile loop, less for an out-and-back Wilson Creek Area, (Trip No. 9, “Backpacking North Carolina”).
Huntfish Falls, 16.4 miles with shorter options, Wilson Creek Area (Trip No. 8, Backpacking North Carolina”).
Clingmans Dome, 26.2 miles, Great Smoky Mountains National Park (Trip No. 19, “Backpacking North Carolina”).
Shining Rock Wilderness, various lengths (Trips 14, 15 and 16, “Backpacking North Carolina”).
Mountains-to-Sea Trail through Graveyard Fields, 3.2 miles, Blue Ridge Parkway (Milepost 418.8) (Hike No. 62, “100 Classic Hikes in North Carolina”).
Basin Cove, Doughton Park, various from 8.5 to 20+ miles, Blue Ridge Parkway (Trip No. 11, “Backpacking North Carolina”).
Pink Beds, 5 miles, Pisgah National Forest near Brevard (Hike No. 80, “100 Classic Hikes in North Carolina”).
Mount Mitchell, various lengths & options, Black Mountains (Trips 1, 2, 3, “Backpacking North Carolina”).
Panthertown Valley.

Learn more about those hikes, here.

Earlier this week, our sister site, NCHikes.com, posted its recommendations for five hikes especially well suited for August. There’s one at the coast (Lake Waccamaw), two in the Piedmont (Pilot Mountain and Johnston Mill Nature Preserve) and two in the mountains (Wilson Creek and Price Lake).
Learn more about those hikes, here.
So what if it’s hot, sweaty summer! Go for a hike!

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Give yourself a White Christmas

JoeMiller — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 10:11:39 +0000

Tuesday’s forecast calls for a high of 58 under partly cloudy skies. Which wouldn’t be bad for early winter IF TUESDAY WEREN’T CHRISTMAS!
Sorry. Feeling a little flush.
Which is why we’re offering up a little escape today to colder times, to times of snow and winter fun and winter camping and skiing and sledding and building a snowman and getting bonked in the noggen with an ice ball — well, maybe not the latter. Still, who couldn’t use a little winter right about now?
So here it is. Grab a hot toddy and enjoy.

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25 North Carolina hikes tailor-made to beat the heat

JoeMiller — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 16:05:00 +0000

Hiking up Basin Creek at Doughton Park.

Come summer, with its 90/90 days (heat/humidity) the last thing on most of our minds is a long hike in the woods. Oceans of sweat, acres of trail-clogging cobwebs, no hydration pack big enough to sate your insatiable thirst. Very understandable, this hike aversion — if you don’t know where to go. For if you do, there are plenty of trails — from North Carolina’s steamy coast, to the stuffy Piedmont to the sun-drenched high country — ideal for summer exploring.

At the coast, you’re wise to incorporate a really large body of saline water in your hike plan. Water is likewise a key ingredient in the Piedmont, though the occasional alpine anomaly also offers relief. In the Appalachians, refreshing waterfalls and elevation combine to offer escape.

We’ve compiled a list of 25 hikes that are especially well-suited to a North Carolina summer, five at the coast, 10 each in the Piedmont and the high country. You can find additional information on each at the links provided and in the references mentioned, “100 Classic Hikes in North Carolina” and “Backpacking North Carolina.”

Let your summer hiking adventure begin here.

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Options considered for coastal Mountains-to-Sea Trail

JoeMiller — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 16:53:19 +0000

The Croatan's wet nature requires lots of pricey bridging and boardwalk, such as this stretch on the Weetock Trail.

My idea of a good time when I can’t be outdoors?
Sitting around a big conference table with the head of the state’s largest trail system and a newly minted map.
Wednesday, Kate Dixon, executive director of the Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail attended a meeting in New Bern about the path the MST would take from New Bern to the Outer Banks. Thursday, she took a few minutes to update me the latest developments on the statewide trail, a 1,000-mile work in progress that will one day run from atop Clingman’s Dome on the Tennessee border across the Tar Heel state to Jockey’s Ridge at the lip of the Atlantic.
A little over half of the trail is done. There’s a 300-mile continuous stretch in the mountains, mostly along the Blue Ridge Parkway, and another good chunk through the Triangle. East of Clayton, though, there’s a long dry spell before you reach the MST’s exciting conclusion along the coast. It was that dry spell that Dixon wanted to talk about.
Specifically, the meeting a day earlier had been about routing the MST through the coastal Croatan National Forest, from New Bern east to the Outer Banks.
“The problem with the Croatan,” she said, “is that it’s wet.”
Indeed. You can’t go far in the 160,000-acre national forest before you run into a wet area known as a pocosin, or upland swamp. Dixon traced her index finger across a number of old roadbeds that seemed to penetrate the forest. Alas, her finger would stop in a pocosin or simply disappear into the mass of coastal jungle growth. Another option, which the FMST isn’t crazy about, is piggybacking on a US 70 bypass around Havelock. Not a lot of esthetic reward in hiking alongside a divided four-lane highway.
Dixon threw a curve ball, though, when she pointed out a sparsely used rail line that runs between the Cherry Point Marine facility near Havelock to Camp LeJeune in Jacksonville, a path roughly perpendicular to a trail coming down the Neuse River. A trail paralleling the Neuse has long been considered the route the MST would take through the coastal plain. The rail line came nowhere close to the Neuse.
“How would that work?” I asked.
“We’re thinking about three types of routes to the coast,” Dixon said.
One would be a paddle route, down the Neuse, to New Bern. Another would be a bike route, following the Neuse as close as possible on less-traveled country roads and passing through the Neuse communities of Goldsboro, Kinston and New Bern. The hiking trail would follow a southerly route, parting ways with the Neuse at Smithfield.
Running a hiking trail along the coastal Neuse is proving problematic on several fronts, Dixon said. In spots, especially in the Let’Lones area below Smithfield, the land is perpetually wet. That’s a problem because the public corridor along the Neuse is only 50 feet wide and much of the surrounding land is privately owned,much of it by folks who have been slow to warm to a public trail running across their property.
So instead, the FMST is looking at dropping the hiking trail south of Smithfield to Bentonville and on to the Bladen Lakes area east of Fayetteville. There, it would make its way east to Jacksonville and pick up the aforementioned rail line, where they might be able to strike an access arrangement. The trail would then tap into the Croatan’s Neusiok Trail and head east to the Outer Banks. Another advantage to the southerly route: there’s more public land to run the trail through.
“It’s just something we’ve started looking at,” says Dixon.

Options for the MST

View Mountains-to-Sea Trail / coastal options in a larger map

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Exclusive Mountains-to-Sea Trail club grows to 25

JoeMiller — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 22:33:06 +0000

Finding Sharon McCarthy's car in a parking lot is pretty easy.

Yesterday, Sharon McCarthy stopped to look at the white dot on the tree trunk, the last of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of such white dots she had seen over the past 22 months.

Well?

Robert Williams and I waited. Sharon, a k a Smoky Scout, was yards away from becoming the sixth person this year and only the 25th total to complete the Mountains-to-Sea Trail. She was staring down her last blaze, and the two of us, her escorts for her final day, were expecting a profound statement. Maybe not “One-small-step …” profound, but something worthy of completing a nearly 1,000-mile journey.

“I’m verklempt,” the 53-year-old Charlotte resident finally offered. “Talk amongst yourselves.”

Traveling 600 miles across North Carolina on foot and another 350 by bike (tracing the temporary road route the MST follows until its completion as a statewide foot trail joining Clingman’s Dome to the west with Jockey’s Ridge to the east) wasn’t something Sharon envisioned herself doing before she turned 50 three years ago. Not that she was unfamiliar with the outdoors. Her family camped and hiked, and she’d been active in the Girl Scouts in outdoor adventures, but she’d never done anything on the order of hiking across a state. But it was a tumultuous time in her life: her mother had died and the last of her three kids was leaving home for college. And there was the turning-50 thing.

“It was my midlife crisis,” she said of her decision to hike nonstop into middle age.

On her 50th birthday she started her quest to join the Great Smoky Mountains 900-Miler Club, membership for which requires hiking all 900 miles of trail in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. She officially joined the club exactly a year later, on her 51st birthday. Meanwhile, she signed on to lead a group training to hike the Grand Canyon as part of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training program. That involved whipping the group into shape on weekly hikes over a four-month period. In the process of expanding her hiking horizons she caught wind of the group hikes led by the Carolina Mountain Club.

“I am a social person and it’s more enjoyable to hike with others and share the experience, the sights, the sounds, the isn’t-this-awesome feeling — and sometimes the shared misery of isn’t-this-awful!” she adds. One CMC hike in particular caught her eye: a trek on the Appalachian Trail that included Charlie’s Bunion. The hike leader was Danny Bernstein who quickly sensed Sharon’s zeal and made a proposal: “I just started hiking the Mountains-to-Sea Trail. Why don’t you join me?”

It sounded like a good encore to the 900-Miler Club, so she signed on. That was in October of 2009.

During her 22 months exploring the MST, Sharon became obsessed with the trail's trademark white blazes.

Over the next 22 months she would cover the MST’s 1,000-mile route in pieces, with day hikes here and there, and in chunks. Some of those chunks involved backpack trips with Danny (which is where I first met Sharon, gingerly toeing her way across a log bridging Pretty Hollow Creek in the Smokies). Some, covering roughly 350 miles of the MST’s temporary road route, were by bike, often with husband Jim, an avid cyclist, as support. (She subsequently returned the favor for his midlife crisis: a 9-day bike tour of the Blue Ridge Parkway.)

The bike sections were her least favorite — and not because of inconsiderate motorists. “Although there were a few drivers who took risks, the vast majority of drivers are very cautious and courteous to cyclists.”

Rather, it was the chase canines who frequently escorted her down country roads. Some only wanted to make sure she didn’t intrude on their master’s territory. Others seemed interested in tasting her bike shoes.

Her quest left her with a smorgasbord of good stories.

The amusing. One night in the Smokies it was frigid cold. She and her hiking partner, a guy she’d only just met, were on the second floor of the Derrick Knob shelter; on the first floor, six Boy Scout leaders pooled their collective heat by snuggling together. “You do whatever you need to to stay warm tonight,” her partner said. She thought for a moment, then gathered her sleeping bag, moved down a floor and asked the Scout leaders to make room.

The scary. On a winter trip in the Smokies she and a friend where supposed to meet a boat shuttle on a finger of Fontana Lake. When they arrived, the lake had been drawn down, making it impossible to meet the shuttle. The original creek remained, however, and it was running hip deep. Not sure what to do, they decided to cross. Her friend slipped and was swept downstream. Fortunately, Sharon was able to help fish her out, but both emerged soaked and cold. They spent the night in a nearby abandoned house and hiked out the way they’d come in the next day, a day later than they’d told friends and family.

“Watching my friend nearly drown was scary.”

The frustrating. Twice, Sharon and Danny were thwarted in their attempt to cross the Linville River at the mouth of Linville Gorge, where the river spreads to the width of a football field. “Both times the water was up, it was cloudy. We didn’t have a good feel about it.” While they weren’t necessarily on a schedule, it was annoying all the same. Even though Danny makes a living writing about hiking, and Sharon is an empty-nester who describes herself as self-employed in a field rapidly becoming obsolete (transcribing depositions), there’s still a limit to how many times you can attempt the same trip. The third time, though, did indeed prove a charm. Knee-deep water, sunny skies … “[it] turned out to be just delightful, standing in the middle of the river and laughing at how fun it was.”

The days that made it all worthwhile. “One moment that really stands out for me is a solo hike” — during a non-MST day — “when I sat down on the trail for a short break. It was fall in the Smokies, dappled sunlight, and every leaf was a shade of yellow. A strong breeze kicked up and I was suddenly showered with acorns, including a hard smack on top of my head. I remember laughing out loud there all by myself on that trail, a very special moment.”

It’s not the moments that yielded a good tale that keep Sharon McCarthy on the trail. Rather, it’s the simple mind-clearing escape of escaping into the woods. “My troubles are guaranteed to disappear for a few hours when I’m on a trail because I simply cannot worry and walk at the same time. I come back sweaty and exhausted and renewed.”

So when she comes up short on a way to verbally express her MST conquest, it’s because it’s not the end. “Next month I’m planning to hike in Death Valley National Park and then climb Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain in the lower 48 states.” This weekend she’ll be back in the high country knocking off a couple of 6,000-foot peaks, toward the possible goal of joining another club: the Carolina Mountain Club’s South Beyond 6,000 Feet for folks who bag all 40 of the South’s peaks above 6,000 feet.

“I have the burning desire to be outside,” Sharon explains, “and the fire is fed every time I go on a hike.” It’s then that she comes up with some words, borrowed from an 82-year-old hiking/biking buddy, that sum up her philosophy for life on the trail and beyond.

“If you want to keep going, you gotta keep going.”

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Sharon McCarthy finished her conquest of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail on an 8-mile stretch along the Eno River, a stretch that included 3.3 miles of the MST’s newest. Read about this 3.3-mile stretch, my newest favorite trail, at NCHikes.com.

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