Sometimes all you need is a little extra incentive to get you out the door and into the wild.
Like an MSR Pocket Rocket Stove. Or a Thermarest Scout Lite Sleeping Pad. Or a set of great birding guides.
Those are some of the incentives we’re offering as part of the Backpacking North Carolina Challenge 2011, which kicks off this evening at 7:30 at the Great Outdoor Provision Co. store in Raleigh’s Cameron Village.
When the East Coast Greenway Alliance announced in February it was moving its headquarters from Rhode Island to the Triangle, the move was a good sign for the state — and a sign that we need help.
The Alliance is the driving force behind the East Coast Greenway, an in-the-works greenway that will one day run continuously from Key West, Fla., to Canada, a distance of nearly 3,000 miles. It bills itself as the urban alternative to the Appalachian Trail, offering a pedestrian-width ribbon of pavement instead natural surface and traveling through as many municipalities as possible, rather than avoiding them. More than 25 percent of the trail now exists. Problem is, the vast majority of the completed path lies well to the north.
Today begins a series of four sprint triathlon posts pegged to a story I wrote that will appear tomorrow, March 8, in The News & Observer and Charlotte Observer. (That story will rerun in this space tomorrow with links.).
Today: Triathlon by the numbers
Wednesday: The growing popularity of sprint triathlons
Thursday: Kim Feth’s story: From walking around her living room to finishing her first sprint tri eight months later.
Friday: Gerald Babao’s story: Trying to out swim, out bike, out run cancer.
On Wednesday, North Carolina’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources announced that attendance at its 39 state parks and recreation areas last year was 14.1 million, just short of the all-time record (The record of 14.2 million visitors was set in 2009.)
Back when William McKinley was president, a first-class postage stamp was $.02 and the champions of college football were the Yale Bulldogs, Frank Chapman thought it might be nice to go out on Christmas Day and look for birds. This was a common occurrence of the day, though the “looking” also involved shooting. Chapman’s idea was to take the gun out of the equation.