Actually, it’s the Grand Opening for just one of the parks; the other is more of a sneak preview.

Officially opening for good is Bertie Beach, a 147-acre tract of wildness (pictured at top), also referred to as Tall Glass of Water, that sits on the Albemarle Sound in Bertie County. Bertie Beach gets its name from the 2,200-foot sand beach that eases into Albemarle Sound, the nearest beach for miles. But the tract has so much more:

• Hiking. There’s a 2-mile trail that weaves through the coastal woods and wetlands that dominate the tract. Flat hiking that exposes you to a land reclaiming its natural state after years of agricultural use. Eventually, there will be 7 miles of trail.
• Swimming. The beach marries the best of the natural world with modern convenience, including restrooms, outdoor showers, a water bottle refill station and a picnic pavilion.
• Primitive camping. A good cool-weather option at the coast.
• Canoe and kayak access. In addition to access, there’s also a kayak storage kiosk. 

Much of this will be open or partially open Saturday.

As if this weren’t enough of a draw, you can also get a sneak peek at the new Salmon Creek State Natural Area, which adjoins the Bertie County property. 

If you haven’t heard of Salmon Creek, it’s no surprise. In short succession, the original 1,000-acre tract, which surrounds its namesake creek, was purchased in 2017 by the N.C. Coastal Land Trust, which realized that the land’s natural beauty and archaeological attributes (native Algonkin artifacts have been found at the site) far outweighed in importance the threatened 2,800-unit development with a 212-slip marina planned for the site. The site was given to the State of North Carolina in December 2018, and in July 2020, the Coastal Land Trust threw in another 297 acres. Combined with the Bertie County site, that’s more than 1,400 continuous acres of exploring.

Saturday morning, N.C. State Parks is hauling its two Big Canoes — Hellbender and Loggerhead — to Salmon Creek for your exploring pleasure. Both canoes seat about 12 folks and will be able to navigate a ways upstream. Trips depart at 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. 

Again, Salmon Creek has not officially opened, so this is a rare opportunity to explore without, technically, trespassing.

I should mention, too, that there will be paddling Friday afternoon on Bennetts Millpond, Friday evening on Pembroke Creek, and Saturday afternoon into evening on Edenton’s Queen Anne’s Creek. The latter coincides with Edenton’s Sounds of Summer Music Festival at the waterfront Colonial Park: enjoy live music from the water!

For more information on Edenton’s Year of the Trail Weekend Festival, go here.

It’s a great way to spend a sultry summer weekend.

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Not when you love the outdoors and 2023 happens to be Year of the Trail in North Carolina.

As I’ve mentioned over the last couple of months, next year has been deemed Year of the Trail in North Carolina and there’s going to be a lot going on. For starters, the State Legislature in 2022 allocated $29.15 million in funding for the Complete the Trails Fund. That money will fund State Trail projects as well as projects deemed :shovel-ready” — that is, the land has been purchased and the trail designed; all that’s needed now is the money to build it. Expect a lot of “Excuse our Mess” signs out in the woods next year.

Activity-wise, the Great Trails State Coalition, a non-profit created to promote North Carolina trails in 2023 and beyond, hopes to see a trail-related event — hike, bike ride, paddle trip, horseback ride — conducted in all 100 North Carolina counties in 2023. And the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources is working up a full slate of fun as well, including programs through their PATH — or Parks and Trails for Health — program. But it’s another Department of Natural and Cultural Resources program that has me suggesting you get out your 2023 calendar (or buy one in the first place).

Big adventures in smaller places

Hometown Strong is an initiative of Gov. Roy Cooper that works with the state’s 80 rural counties to boost their prosperity. In general, communities identify problems they need help with — from modernizing their websites to overhauling their water treatment systems — and Hometown Strong’s policy analysts work to help them solve those problems, in large part by helping them find available funding. 

Sometimes, though, it works in reverse. In the case of Year of the Trail, Hometown Strong identified 11 communities with unheralded — or underheralded — recreational resources, and is working with those communities to shine a light on said resources. This will take place in 2023 in the form of trail day weekends celebrating these resources with street fairs and guided hikes and trips. This is where you get out your 2023 calendar to jot down the following trail festival dates:

• February 17-19 — Elizabethtown
• March 24-26 — Morganton
• April 22-23 — Eden
• May 12-14 — Sanford
• June 2-4 — Old Fort
• June 2-4 — Elizabeth City
• September 15-17 — Swansboro
• October 15-17 — Robbinsville

Other communities with dates yet to be determined are West Jefferson, Edenton, and Shelby.

With the possible exceptions of Morganton and Old Fort, you may be looking at this list and wondering: I’ve never heard of some of these places. Who on Earth put this list together? 

I did.

Elizabethtown? Eden?

In July, I was brought aboard Hometown Strong as an ecotourism advisor. It’s a dream assignment because in my 30 years of writing about the outdoors in the Southeast, and my 10 years of guiding trips, I’ve been all about uncovering the state’s hidden gems. From the state parks less visited (Medoc Mountain), to the back entrances to popular spots (the Longbottom Access to Doughton Park), to the places you might not think to visit unless you think about the right time to visit (the Great Dismal Swamp, in the dead of winter).

Basically, the places best accessed through the towns Hometown Strong will celebrate in 2023.

But … Elizabethtown? you ask.

You bet, Elizabethtown! (For those of you scratching your head, Elizabethtown is in the Coastal plain, southeast of Fayetteville.)

For starters, the Mountains-to-Sea runs through Elizabethtown. The area is also home to Jones Lake and Singletary Lake state parks, as well as Turnbull Creek Educational State Forest. There’s also Bay Tree Lake State Natural Area, Bladen Lakes State Forest, the Suggs Mill Pond Game Lands. There’s at least 70 miles of hiking in the area, through pine savannah, bay forest and more. On a cool and sunny winter’s day, you can’t find a better place to hike.

And Eden? I don’t even know where that is?

It’s north of Greensboro, near the Virginia line. It’s also where we recently relocated to, in part because of the varied outdoor opportunities. (I can be on the Smith or Dan rivers in less than 10 minutes after getting a hankering to paddle.) And where hikes such as the one in Mayo River State Park take you to surprising finds such as Deshazo Falls, pictured above.

Through the end of this year, I’ll be taking you to the 11 communities we will celebrate in 2023. I’ll provide an overview of the activities and a hint of the event itself (a “hint” because some won’t be fully conceptualized until after the first of the year).

Truly, the Great Trails State

In fact, some of you may even scoff at the notion of North Carolina as the “Great Trails State.”

For starters, there’s the 1,175-mile Mountains-to-Sea Trail, the 300 miles of the Appalachian Trail (some of which we share with Tennessee); The Great Smoky Mountains National Park with its 800 miles of trail (again, we share some with Tennessee), the Blue Ridge Parkway, known for  its scenic pavement but with 369 miles of trail (some of which is in Virginia), the Art Loeb Trail, the Neusiok Trail, the Bartram Trail, the Benton MacKaye Trail, the Foothills Trail … .

Perhaps even more impressive is everything that’s to come. There’s the 159 trail projects identified by the Great Trails State Coalition as waiting to come out of the ground. There’s the Fonta Flora State Trail, which is seemingly growing by the month and will one day link Morganton and Asheville. There’s the 40-mile Northern Peaks State Trail, the northern terminus for which will likely break ground in 2023 on Paddy Mountain near West Jefferson. There’s footbridge construction in the works that will result in a 12-mile continuous stretch of the MST near Elizabethtown, resulting in one of the longest completed stretches of the MST east of Smithfield. 

Trails are in demand in North Carolina and the money to build them is becoming available. That’s thanks in part to the State Legislature and its visionary Complete the Trails Fund. But also to the communities, especially the smaller ones, willing to allocate often sparse resources to create trails. Those communities are the ones we will celebrate in 2023.

So, again, mark your calendars.

 * * *

Resources

• Great Trails State Coalition. You can find additional information on Year of the Trail here; you’ll find even more when it posts its calendar listing all events planned for the year.
• Parks and Trails for Health. This program through the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources is a new initiative intended to promote physical activity in the state’s parks, greenways and other outdoor spaces. Find information about those activities and, in 2023, Year of the Trail events here.

The post Year of the Trail: Start Marking Your 2023 Calendar appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

The sun was unimpeded in chasing off the morning chill, a gentle breeze played in the marsh grass and my swamp kayak rocked ever-so-slightly in the near-still water. Fifteen feet off my starboard bow, an alligator dozed. I watched for several minutes, expecting him to blink. He never did. Apparently, he, too, was savoring the delayed start to spring.
My opening day on the water with the help of SimbaSeaTrips for the  2014 paddling season, and it was hard to picture a better start.
I started paddling Milltail Creek in the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in the mid-1990s, drawn both by the refuge’s well-deserved reputation for being some of the wildest 152,000 acres around, and also by the promise — guarantee, practically — of seeing an alligator. The wild was hard to miss: the impenetrable tanglescape beyond the creek’s banks, the cacophony of bird song and assorted other swamp noises, the realization that alligators, bears, red wolves, three types of venomous snakes (cottonmouth, copperhead and timber rattler) and who knows what else roamed the reserve. Yet I’d never seen an alligator. At least that I was aware of.
In 2006 I took one of the guided paddles led by the NWR between June and August. Twenty minutes into the trip, someone asked, “How come there aren’t any alligators?”
The ranger got us to raft up about 20 yards from the south bank. “Watch those ‘logs,’” he advised. After a minute or so, one blinked. Then another. Before long, about a half dozen logs had revealed themselves. I’ve since seen a number of alligators along Milltail Creek.
As I was loading my boat, a guide with two clients arrived at the put-in. He’d been on Milltail

Creek six times this year; this was the first gator sighting. I took that as an omen for the coming paddling season.
In the late afternoon I drove north of Edenton and spent the last two hours of daylight exploring Dimmicks Creek, one of several intimate and accessible creeks that feed the Chowan River. I paddled leisurely, watching the sunlight gradually climb the trunks of bald cypress. When I got back to the put-in, I was tempted to paddle to the middle of the nearby millpond and watch the stars rise. But it had been a full day already and I still had a three-hour drive home. Best not to be too greedy on opening day.

* * *

As a result, I find myself in a paddling frame of mind and believe you might like to be in one as well. Here are two options to check out:

• 

  Our list of  “51 Places to Rent a Canoe, Kayak or Stand up Paddleboard in North Carolina.” Not all may be operating this early in the season, but most should be on the first decent weekend of spring.

• Roanoke River Partners Paddle Days 2014, which is this Sunday. Paddle Days starts in Jamesville with coffee and snacks before putting in between 8:30 and 9 a.m. Then there’s the 12-mile paddle down the Roanoke River to Plymouth — with a stop on one of the Roanoke’s camping platforms — followed by lunch at the Cypress Grill back in Jamesville. The $35 fee goes toward the Roanoke River Partners, a non-profit aimed at protecting and promoting the Roanoke. It’s a great way to discover the Roanoke, and access to scores of local paddlers, a good way to learn about the other paddling secrets of eastern North Carolina. Learn more here.

Enjoy the weekend! And feel free to share your adventures on our Facebook page, where we’ll be sharing an adventure or two ourselves.

The post Let the paddling season begin appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

Tuesday, I had one of the more exhausting times I’ve had in 20 years of covering outdoor adventure — and I was in an air-conditioned building. At a catered affair.
The affair was a media event sponsored by the North Carolina Division of Tourism, a gathering of tourism promotion types from around the state and the people they hoped would write about them. People such as myself.
Immediately upon walking in the door of the Contemporary Art Museum — CAM for short — in downtown Raleigh I was met by my old buddy, Suzanne Brown. Suzanne and I worked together for years in the Features Department of The News & Observer, Suz overseeing everything entertainment, me doing my outdoors thing. In 2008, we were both part of a massive newsroom exodus. I landed here, Suz  at Tourism, a job that suits her as she wasted little time getting my attention.
“Do you know about the Southeast Coast Saltwater Paddle Trail?” she asked.
I didn’t, but I didn’t feel too bad upon learning that the trail is a work in progress, a proposed — though some of it exists — paddle trail running from Virginia south through the Carolinas and Georgia, where it will meet with the existing 1,515-mile Florida Circumnavigational Saltwater Paddling Trail. A kind of Appalachian Trail for paddlers.
“Cool!” I said.
“What about Jetpacks?” she wanted to know.
“And what about telephones with TV screens and flying cars?” I said.
No, she said, you can now rent a JetPak on the Outer Banks.
Then, in a Graduatesque nod to the Next Big Thing, she leaned in and whispered “Zip Lines.”

“Have you been to ZipQuest in Fayetteville? It’s a two-and-a-half-hour canopy tour that takes you over the largest waterfall in the eastern U.S.”
A zipline over the highest waterfall in the East — in Fayetteville? I started edging away.
“You can also fly a Wright Brothers glider!” she yelled, chasing me down the hall.
The madness continued inside the main hall.
At the Halifax County booth, Lori Medlin, president and CEO of the county’s convention and visitors bureau asked if I’d been to the Sylvan Heights Bird Park in Scotland Neck. Hike 5 miles at this 18-acre preserve, take pictures of more than 170 bird species from around the world. “There’s even a treehouse. And it’s handicap-accessible!”
“You like trails?” she continued. “The 7-mile-long Roanoke Canal Trail in Roanoke Rapids is pretty popular.”
Lori shared a table with Claire Phillips, director of marketing and public relations for the Pinehurst/Southern Pines/Aberdeen Area. I expected to hear something about golf. “We have an extensive greenway system,”  she said.

I found myself at the Fayetteville table, expecting to hear more about the zipline to outer space. And I did, but I also learned that Fayetteville is also home to the biggest indoor climbing gym in the state, The Climbing Place, with 18,000 square feet of climbing surface, 40,000 holds and 60 top ropes.
I learned that Chowan County has more than 300 miles of mapped paddle trails, that Washington has a Sunrise Yoga Paddle service as well as a Wine and Cheese Paddle, and that Edenton rents canoes and kayaks out of its harbor.
I learned from Craig Distl that since the Hawksnest Resort near Boone abandoned skiing and snowboarding a few years back it’s gone tubing and zipline crazy. And I learned that while they still ski and ride at Ski Beech, the highest ski area in the East, they’ve also opened the Emerald Outback, an 8-mile mountain bike trail network.
I learned that the Biltmore in Asheville is getting its own marathon and that a mountaintop-to-mountaintop zipline is being planned at Navitat north of Asheville.

Farther west, I learned from Charles Conner with the Nantahala Outdoor Center that the NOC is about more than just really fast moving water. Survival, for instance.
“We’ve got a Survival School that shows you how to survive 72 hours in the wild,” he said, adding, “Seventy-two hours — that’s about how long most people stay lost.” The ones who end up getting found, that is.
By the time I’d worked my way to the westernmost part of the state, I was pooped. But not too pooped to visit the craft beer booth, where Win Bassett was more than happy to fill my sampler cup with the handiwork of North Carolina’s 65 craft breweries (or at least the 65 that belong to NC Brewing). Fullsteam Brewery’s Summer Basil was particularly tasty.
A handful of booths remained, but — holy cow! — I’d just been across North Carolina on everything from a zipline to a JetPak to the Wright Brothers glider.
I needed a nap.

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