You’re eager to show your visiting friends and family why you love living in the region: the outdoor opportunities that make this such a wonderful place to explore. You also don’t want to alienate your guests — or worse, harm them! — by taking them on an outing beyond their capabilities. Fortunately, you can do the former while avoiding the latter with the 10 hikes below, hikes that offer considerable esthetic bang for minimal physical exertion. 

We give a short description of why these hikes are suitable for the non-adventurous in your life, then provide a link for additional information.

Coast, coastal plain

The Basin Trail

2.2 miles (out and back)

Fort Fisher State Recreation Area, Kure Beach

Spending time at the coast this holiday season? This hike, just outside Wilmington, starts at the Atlantic Ocean and makes its way through open marsh (the soggier parts are on elevated boardwalk) to The Basin on the sound side. At the midpoint, visit an old World War II munitions bunker that was later home, for more than a decade, to the Fort Fisher Hermit.

More info here.

Bay Trail

4 miles

Jones Lake State Park, Elizabethtown

Need to get your beloved visitors out of the house for the day? Send them to Jones Lake southeast of Fayetteville for a 4-mile meander around a regional oddity: a Carolina bay. No one is quite sure how these shallow, oval-shaped bays originated (the result of a meteor shower is the best bet), but there were once a half million of them along the East Coast. The hike around this surviving bay is half pine savanna, half swampy bay forest, all flat.

More info here.

Charlotte area

The Boulders Access

0.5 miles

Crowders Mountain State Park, Kings Mountain

Lure your hiking-recalcitrant crew to The Boulders with the promise of seeing the boulders just a short hike from the car. Then, when they’re smitten, suggest hiking just a little farther, a little farther, a little farther on the Ridgeline Trail, which will take you either south into South Carolina or north for about six miles to the main part of Crowders Mountain State Park.

More info here.

Triangle

The Peaks Loop

1/2 mile

Horton Grove Nature Preserve, Bahama

This half-mile trail is especially alluring in late fall, with the mature beech forest casting a brilliant yellow glow over a carpet of copper leaves. Ridgeline and valley hiking, with a short drop in, a short climb out on well-groomed trail. Want more? Tack on the 0.8-mile Holman Loop through a recovering Piedmont prairie.

More info here. 

Seven Mile Creek Natural Area

2 miles

Orange County southwest of Hillsborough

You’ll find some of the foot-friendliest trail around on this ramble through mature upland woods and down to Seven Mile Creek, a spritely creek that, shortly, feeds into the Eno River. The preserve’s difficult-to-find trailhead all but insures you’ll avoid holiday crowds.

More info here.

Pump Station Trail

1.5 miles

Pump Station Access, Eno River State Park, Durham

An especially good hike for kids — closely supervised kids — because it takes in the ruins of the old Durham waterworks. Brick foundations, an old dam, and other remnants of the long-abandoned water plant make for great kid exploring. The trail includes a stretch along a particularly rocky run of the Eno.

More info here.

De hart Botanical Garden

up to 4 miles

Louisburg

A short hike in gets you to a waterfall, a bamboo garden and a lake with a rock outcrop perfect for hanging out on. Venture farther and you’ll find another waterfall and one of the oldest white oak trees in the region. Something is always in bloom at this 92-acre preserve off U.S. 401 between Raleigh and Louisburg.

More info here.

Triad

Cane Creek Mountains Natural Area

2.5 miles

Snow Camp

Live in the Triad or Triangle and don’t have time to visit the mountains? How about the mountains in our midst, the Cane Creek Mountains south of Burlington? You’ll get an Appalachian-type experience on this 2.5-mile loop that traverses surprisingly rocky terrain before topping out just below 1,000 feet. A bit more of a physical investment, but the payoff is worth it.

More info here. 

Horne Creek Trail

2.5 miles

Bean Shoals Access, Pilot Mountain State Park, Pinnacle

The main parking area atop Pilot Mountain gets so crowded on weekends that hikers are now shuttled from the base to the summit. Avoid Pilot’s plenty by heading to the Bean Shoals Access and hiking this flatter stretch of trail that includes intimate Horne Creek and the expansive Yadkiin River.

More info here.

Little Long Mountain

1.6 miles (out and back) 

Uwharrie National Forest, Asheboro

From the Joe Moffitt Trailhead it’s a 0.8-mile hike up the north side of the 922-foot mountain (you’ll pass a spring midway, on your left) to the best on-trail view in the Uwharrie range. From the summit meadow you have a 240-degree view from the east to the south to the west; early risers can catch sunrise, night-owls sunset and the rest of us an expansive view of this relict central North Carolina mountain range.

More info here.

The post 10 Hikes for Holiday Visitors appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

On this morning, 14 backpackers showed up with no packs at all. All each had was a little bag with enough clothes and whatnot for an overnight trip. In their defense, they hadn’t been told to bring a pack; they were simply told where to meet.

This was not our typical weekend walk in the woods.

My co-leader on this trip was Jacob Boehm, executive chef and owner of Snap Pea Underground and Catering. About once a month for the past three years, Jacob has hosted a nine-course meal at locations you wouldn’t associate with dining. Like the roof of a building in downtown Raleigh. Or the retired bridge spanning the Haw River in Bynum. He plans each meal just a few days in advance, based on what’s fresh and available. Diners don’t find out until 36 hours in advance what they’ll be eating, or where they’ll be eating it. When Jacob announces a dinner on his website, all 150 or so spots sell out within minutes.

Jacob’s hunger for unique and memorable settings led him to me. He wanted to do a dinner in the backcountry, one that would require a hike in of about five miles, that would have a mountaintop view, that would be no more than an hour-and-a-half drive from the Triangle. And we’d need a nearby water source. I had just the spot in mind: Little Long Mountain in the Uwharrie Mountains southwest of Asheboro, where the bald-ish summit affords the only mountain-top view of the Uwharries, to the east (sunrise), the south (the bulk of the Uwharrie range), and to the west (sunset).

So, there at the trailhead, we had 14 backpacks prepacked with a combined total of 120 pounds of food and a cooling system devised from Platypus water pouches filled with frozen wine and Manhattans. Strapped to one pack was a grill grate. We fitted the hikers with backpacks while noshing on apple cider doughnuts. We set out under cloud cover and after a few miles, we stopped for cold fried chicken and roasted heirloom potato salad with lemon buttermilk dressing. As we reached the summit about four hours after we started, the skies parted, giving way to the mountain-top view of the Uwharries. Working in teams, we started a fire in the pit and mixed up dough for flatbread that later would be grilled on the fire. A water team headed down to the spring to fill up a bin. A gang plucked parsley for the chimichurri to go with the dry-aged ribeye steak. Butternut squash roasted on the fire was scraped and pureed by hand and combined with other deliciousness. As we worked around the fire pit, the sky itself reflected the flames in a spectacular orange that lasted long beyond the average sunset time. Or so it seemed.

“You know how any food tastes good when you’re camping?” Jacob explained (over the rhubarb and hibiscus gin gimlet, as I recall), “I wanted to see what really good food tastes like.” It tasted just fine.

After some chatting under the crystalline night sky that revealed the Milky Way, we retreated to our tents. Morning brought bowls of steaming congee that had soaked overnight, and mugs of restorative coffee. We reluctantly bundled up tents and packs, much lighter now after a day of reducing the fine food stores. On our way out, we had a lunch of country ham, sopressata and aged chorizo sandwiches and cornmeal thumbprint cookies with scuppernong jam.

The food was, indeed, delightful. But it wasn’t just the food that made the weekend memorable. To a person, the group couldn’t have had a better attitude and appreciation for the weekend from the get-go. Not 10 minutes down the trail, my new friend Scott told me, “I can’t believe how much more relaxed I already feel.”

On Saturday night, as the sky faded into a deep crimson and the temperature headed to an overnight low in the 50s, we sat around the crackling fire, enjoying smores made of hand-crafted bourbon marshmallows, crackers made from North Carolina graham flour, and dark Videri chocolate. How on Earth could I possibly replicate this experience? I wondered.

Hiking out the next day with Melissa and Tonya, I learned that an amended version would be just fine.

“This has been such a great hike,” Melissa said. “The campsite was unbelievable.”

“I’d love to offer trips like this,” I said. “But I think I’d fall short on the foraged sumac, grilled flatbread and charred Piracicaba broccolini.”

“You know what would be perfect?” asked Melissa. “A couple hot dogs wrapped in crescent roll dough. People could roast them on a stick over the fire.” Store-bought marshmallows, Hershey chocolate and Great Value grahams would be fine, too. They continued on with menu items well within my reach.

In the days since, I’ve been thinking about my weekend with Jacob and how it might influence our GetBackpacking! trips in the year ahead. Food a step up from lasagna revived from dust-in-a-bag is a good start. We’re working on non-food-related ways as well.

And by “we,” I mean the entire GetBackpacking! community: if you have a thought about where we should go in 2018 and how we should do it, let me know. You can reach me at joe@getgoingnc.com.

We may not be serving roasted heirloom potato salad with lemon buttermilk dressing on next year’s trips. But we will explore cuisine beyond beef jerky dipped in Nutella. And discover, once again, that food does taste better when you’re outdoors.

Happy trails,

Joe

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To learn more about our GetBackpacking! trips and programs, go here.

To learn more about Snap Pea Underground, go here.

The post Frozen Manhattans and other reasons this trip was different appeared first on GetGoing NC!.