But hey, it’s the goal that has risen to the top and the one that’s proven the most motivating. Through the first five weeks of the year I have added five new trails to my hiking vitae. They are:

Fox Trail

Mayo River State Park, Mayodan

1.8 miles

Not only was it my first time on the trail, it was anyone’s first time! Mayo Mountain celebrated January 1 with the grand opening of its Fox Trail. I first hiked the park’s lone 2-mile trail shortly after it opened in April 2010. Can’t wait for more, I thought. It was a bit of a wait, 14 years, but it was worth it. The new trail explores a part of the park with rolling terrain and minimal understory. With the original trail, you can now get in a 4-mile hike at Mayo Mountain. Learn more here.

Iron Ore Belt Pit Trail

Haw River State Park: Iron Ore Belt Access, Greensboro

0.4 miles

OK, so it’s only a connector trail, but it serves two functions: one, it provided access to a long-abandoned ore pit; and, two, it offers a 2-mile option by shortening the nearly 4-mile Great Blue Heron Trail. The 2-miler makes this a good option for new hikers just beginning to build endurance. Learn more here.

Haw River State Trail: Longmeadow Trailhead

Haw River State Trail, Graham

1.8 miles (one way)

The Haw River State Trail covers 70 miles along its namesake river, from north of Greensboro to Jordan Lake. Rather, it will cover 70 miles; to date, 20 miles have been finished, including this stretch in Graham at I-40. This is flat hiking that can get a bit muddy after a rain. It appears to get less traffic than other stretches of the trail, making it great for a contemplative, escapist stroll. Learn more here.

Pioneer Camp Trail

Cane Creek Mountains Natural Area, Snow Camp

3.4 miles

Cane Creek is fast gaining a reputation as the place to go for a long hike in the Triad and Triangle region. It opened in April of 2020, at the beginning of the Pandemic, with 4.5 miles of trail at the Pine Hill Trailhead, and just last fall added 5.9 miles with its new Oak Hill Trailhead. There are two connecting loops at this trailhead, Pioneer Camp being the longest. The hiking here is similar to what you find to the southwest in the Uwharrie Mountains, with lots of surprising elevation; as one hiker on a GetHiking! hike Sunday groaned: “Does this ever go down?” Yes … eventually. Learn more here.

Lookout Trail

Cane Creek Mountains Natural Area, Snow Camp

2.5 miles

This is the shorter of Pine Hill’s two trails, but atop Cane Creek Mountain, topping out at just under 1,000 feet, Lookout connects with the Northern Approach Trail on the Oak Hill side of this Alamance Parks natural area. Lookout provides the best view in the park, a view that will get better with a planned observation tower to be built nearby. You can now hike nearly 10 miles of connected trail at Cane Creek, with another 6 miles coming soon. Plans call for an eventual 24 miles of trail at Cane Creek. Learn more here.

New trails: a good way to add new perspective to your hiking in the new year.

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Sometimes that’s the key to exploring a trail. Patience, as in following a trail that isn’t well blazed — or blazed at all. Patience in finding the trailhead. Or patience in even finding clues on the internet that the trail even exists. Thank heaven for friends who somehow found it and hiked it.

At the end of last year, a new hiking friend in my new town of Eden was telling me about trails in the area. Some I’d already hiked, others I’d heard of but had yet to pay a visit. Then there was the trail at Lake Reidsville, which I hadn’t heard of. “I think it’s about 3 miles,” said my friend.

Curiously, the website for the Lake Reidsville Recreation Area was short on details about the multi-use trail. In fact, you had to download a park brochure to learn they even have a trail. The Dan River Basin Association was more helpful; on an interactive map of recreational resources in their coverage zone — the piedmont of southern Virginia and northern North Carolina — I learned that the park has two nature trails and one hiking/biking trail, that the latter “weaves in and out of a disc-golf course, and was lengthened by the Dan River Basin Association in 2020 and 2021. The new section of trail includes boardwalks and bridges along the lakeshore which may provide glimpses of wintering waterfowl.” 

I had a general description of where to find the trailhead, which was unmarked. Still, it took two visits to find. That was half the battle. Keeping the trail was equally challenging: a variety of trails weave through the first quarter mile, none of which are marked. I saw two blazes in 4 miles. But once I got a quarter mile in, patience and perseverance paid off.

For the most part, the trail hugs the shore of Lake Reidsville. A mile in, though, the trail is a series of three strung-together loops. Bear right at each loop intersection and a simple out-and-back becomes a hike out along the lake, a hike back that diverts up to the ridge. There’s a section of mature bottomland hardwoods and lots of hiking through  young, maturing forest. The trail that was added by DRBA in 2020 and 2021 was designed for both foot and bike traffic, as evidenced by sections with subtle berms and banked curves. 

I saw no one on my hike, both blessing and curse. Blessing because who doesn’t like a quiet trail. Curse because the fledgling trail has been used little and in spots appears to be reverting back to nature. The trail needs traffic to survive. 

By the time I got back to the trailhead, I’d clocked 4.3 miles on my GPS. That’s not only the longest trail I’ve found in the tri-city (Reidsville, Eden, Wentworth) area, but worth, oh, say, an hour, hour and a half to hike.

My two contributions to this trail’s future:

1. I’m working on an eguide for the trail, including map, route description and other pertinent details (like how to find the trailhead). Until then, I’ll point you in the direction of the trailhead: enter the park, at 630 Waterworks Road in Reidsville, and drive to near the end. When you see the lake, you’ll see a camp store on your left, parking on your right. The trailhead is near the picnic shelters across from the parking. A wooden staircase way leads down to a footbridge; continue straight; shortly, go right over another footbridge and continue.
2. I’m leading a hike on the trail as part of Eden/Rockingham County’s NC Trail Days Weekend Festival April 21-23. The hike will be on Saturday, April 22, at 11 a.m. Learn more and sign up here.

Sign up to join me on April 22. The more hiking feet the merrier

* * *

Year of the Trail

Learn more about the NC Trail Days Weekend Festival in Eden/Rockingham County here.

Learn more about other Year of the Trail events at the Great Trails State Coalition web site here.

The post Patience yields a trail gem appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

It’s one of our favorite things to hear, because it means we’re meeting one of our key goals: leading you into the unknown. Sure, we hike a lot of trails more than once, and for good reason: they’re worth it. Our Charlotte group goes to South Mountains State Park regularly, our Charlottesville crew loves the Jones Run/Doyles River Circuit in the Shenandoah National Park. And with 120 miles of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail running through the Triangle, I’ve lead a goodly number of hikes on the statewide path along the Eno River and the south shore of Falls Lake. 

But it’s the new discoveries most hikers really love.

“Show of hands,” I said at the beginning of a recent hike at the Shallow Ford Natural Area north of Burlington: “How many of you have hiked here before?” 

None of the eight hikers raised a hand.

Ditto a recent after-work hike at the two-year-old Brumley Nature Preserve in Chapel Hill, at Little River Regional Park on the Durham/Orange county line, and on the Great Blue Heron Loop Trail at Haw River State Park’s Iron Ore Belt Access area. Some of these gems are new, some simply off the beaten path. We’re constantly on the lookout for both.

This week, we thought we would highlight a few upcoming adventures to places that may be new to you.

• Confluence Natural Area, day hike, Hillsborough, July 22. The Eno River Association is one of those land trusts whose work frequently flies under the radar. If you’ve hiked in Eno River State Park, or at Little River Regional Park, you’ve likely hiked on land preserved by the ERA. They typically buy land in the Eno watershed, then, eventually, turn it over to North Carolina State Parks. This spring, though, the ERA opened the 200-acre Confluence Natural Area, its first preserve open to the public, where we’ll explore 2-miles of newly blazed trail.

• Standing Indian Recreation Area, hiking/camping weekend, Nantahala National Forest, Aug. 24-26. Standing Indian was new to me when I scouted it in 2009. I was finalizing which trips to include in my book “Backpacking North Carolina” and noticed this big network of trails west of Franklin. It seemed worth a chance — and it was. On this trip, the main hike is an 11-mile loop consisting of a mellow climb up Kimsey Creek to the Appalachian Trail at Deep Gap, then hiking north to 5,498-foot Standing Indian and back to camp on the Lower Ridge Trail. We’ll do a shorter hike Sunday.
• Curtis Creek, hiking/camping weekend, Pisgah National Forest, Sept. 28-30. The Curtis Creek area of the Pisgah outside Old Fort is hardly new: in fact, it’s the oldest tract in the Pisgah National Forest, dating back more than a century. It’s also not new in that it’s home to some of the oldest old growth in the Pisgah. We’ll explore here and in the nearby Montreat Wilderness area with a climb up 5,592-foot Graybeard Mountain.
• Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock/Citico Creek Wilderness, four-day backpack trip, Nantahala and Cherokee National Forests, Oct. 25-29. This is the mountain land that time forgot. Too rugged and remote to draw much interest from logging concerns, the area was a natural for inclusion as a designated Wilderness Area. The area may be popular with locals — what locals there are — but it’s largely untouched by us outsiders.
• Nags Head Woods Preserve, hiking/camping weekend, Outer Banks, Nov. 2-4. Usually, when you head to the Outer Banks, your thoughts are on the beach, not the trail. Yet there’s some stunning hiking to be done, none more so than through the maritime forest at The Nature Conservancy’s thousand-acre Nags Head Woods Preserve. Five miles of trail explores everything from dense woods to the sound. That’s Saturday; on Sunday, we’ll do another five miles amid some of the oldest trees in North Carolina, in Pettigrew State Park.

Interested in expanding your adventure horizons? Find more information on each adventure in the links below and join us.

Happy trails,

Joe

Explore!

Learn more about the new places we’ll be exploring by clicking on the links below.

• Confluence Natural Area
• Standing Indian
• Curtis Creek
• Joyce Kilmer-Slicrock/Citico Creek Wilderness
• Nags Head Woods

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