We’ve run this post before. It’s what we call an “evergreen,” meaning, with a tweak or two, it stands the test of time: What held true when it first rain — the hikes we thought were classic fall hikes then — we feel remain the classics.
This year, though, we run it with added enthusiasm because one of the trails mentioned has just reopened after being closed for nearly a year: the Mount Mitchell Trail at Mount Mitchell State Park. A couple quick caveats:
The following first appeared at the start of Fall 2019. It appears again today, updated and tweaked, but relevant as ever as we head into the Fall 2025 hiking season.
From an astronomical standpoint, fall doesn’t begin until around 2:19 p.m. on September 22. That would be the autumnal equinox, that magical day when we have as many hours of daylight as dark.
A variation of this post originally ran Aug. 6, 2014, titled “SUMMER HIKING: BEAT THE HEAT.” Two years later, we played with it again and reran it on July 20, 2016, as “HIKING: WHERE TO BEAT THE HEAT.” It appeared under that heading again on July 6, 2021. On Aug. 11, 2023, it ran again, paired down from 10 hikes to 5, but with more detail on each hike. It runs again today, on the 11th anniversary of its initial appearance, with one caveat.
Saturday is National Trails Day. OK, every day is trails day, or at least it should be. But things get in the way of us honoring trails on a daily basis, so for the last 40 years or so we’ve set aside the first Saturday in June to make sure there’s at least one day we won’t forget about our trails.
Today we revisit a topic we first wrote in 2012: 10 of our favorite winter hikes. Hikes that, for various reasons, are especially good hiked in cold weather. For some (at the coast, for instance, it’s the only time you can hike them, lest you have an immunity to squadrons of dive-bombing mosquitoes and an unusually high tolerance for things that slither. For others, it may be a view otherwise obscured by a lush, full forest, or for the opportunity to hike in evergreen conditions, or because of exposed terrain that lets winter’s warming sun shine in. IMPORTANT NOTE: For mountain hikes especially check to make sure the trail is open; many mountain hikes remain closed as a result of Hurricane Helene.
