Tag Archives: Jockey’s Ridge

Exclusive Mountains-to-Sea Trail club grows to 25

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. read more

This weekend, make a night of it

If we wanted to live on the Sun, we would have moved there. Instead, the Sun apparently has decided to move here. More record-breaking heat is upon us, which would have more more sane people opting to stay indoors. For those of us of hearty, boiling  stock, that’s not an option. We just need to play it smart: Instead of going out in the daytime when it’s 102 in the shade, we’ll simply wait until the evening when it cools off to the upper 90s. read more