I miss winter.
I realized just how much on Sunday when I found myself in need of a second layer. Light gloves wouldn’t have been bad, either. Or a hat. There’d been snow a ways back, I recalled, and it was cold for a couple days after. But since? I couldn’t recall the last time a hike had started in 30-degree weather.
Allen de Hart, who wrote 11 trail guides, founded the Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, hiked more than 65,000 miles by the time he was 86 (and would go on to hike several hundred more), and was generally regarded as the dean of North Carolina hiking, died Oct. 14, in Raleigh. Allen was known for hiking; those who knew him, knew him for much more. GetGoingNC’s Joe Miller remembers the lesser-known side of Allen de Hart.
It’s been — and continues to be — a rough week for a lot of folks in North Carolina, especially down east. For the weekend, we recommend the best therapy we know: a walk in the woods. Today, we pull hikes from Hike NC!, our statewide hiking collaboration with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina. For more information on Hike NC! go here.
That breath of fresh air you inhaled coming out of the house Monday morning — a breath devoid of hot, of wet, of recreational despair — convinced our GetHiking! crews that there’s no need to wait for fall in order to take a fall-like hike. Let’s do it now, our hike leaders declared. Or at least this weekend.
So we will.
This weekend, GetHiking! Charlotte, GetHiking! Triad and GetHiking! Triangle will all exceed the 10-mile mark, a distance typically not contemplated by most until it’s time to toss a fleece into the daypack. Fleece be danged, let’s hike!
Here’s what our three hiking groups have planned for the weekend:
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.