Fall color is spreading across the state. Here are three ways to take advantage.
Coast
Sometimes, all it takes is the alignment of the right stars to kick-start an active lifestyle. Perfect weather — sunny skies, highs in the mid-60s. A challenging, but not overly so, adventure. A supportive environment. Beer.
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:
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.
Today’s 90-Second Escape: Summer Hiking: Better When Wet
Yesterday afternoon I got to experience new trail. Not new to me, new period.
Earlier this year, volunteers from the Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail connected the 60 miles of MST along Falls Lake with 10 miles of trail along the Eno River through its namesake state park. The long-awaited link between Penny’s Bend to Durham’s West Point on the Eno city park penetrates an especially junglelike stretch of the Eno that required little money but a lot of sweat equity by a workforce headed by FMST volunteer Fred Dietrich.
“Did you see the bridge?” asked FMST member John Willis. “We had to haul the 400-pound support beams 100 feet, which was about 99 feet too far.”
The effort is an example of how the vast majority of our recreational trails come to be: through the dedication of volunteers like Fred, John and legions of others.
On Saturday, June 7, you can become one of those legions. June 7 is National Trails Day, a two-decade-old event sponsored by the American Hiking Society in which we celebrate our trails by hiking them, by maintaining them, by building more of them.
So far, according to the American Hiking Society, 25 NTD events are planned in North Carolina; you’ll find a list of them below. We doubt this list is complete, which is why we run it this week. If you have or know of an NTD event not included here, send us the details — or at least point us in a direction where we can find the specifics.
We’ll rerun a more complete list a week from today, on Thursday, June 5. In the meantime, leave Saturday, June 7 open. You have a date with a trail.
We have this remarkable path working its way across the state called the Mountains-to-Sea-Trail. It’s western end is atop Clingman’s Dome, on the Tennessee state line in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. To the east, it ends (or begins) atop Jockey’s Ridge — whichever dune happens to be highest on the day in question. About 550 miles of the estimated 1,150-mile trail is complete.