The winter sky is dry and clear, the temperature cold, invigorating. It’s the perfect weather for a long mountain hike. Then, your car loaded with gear and enthusiasm, you find your travels and day-hike dreams shattered by those two little words on a barricade baring access to the trailhead: 

Road closed.

It happens in the Southern Appalachians this time of year. It happens frequently on the Blue Ridge Parkway, off of which you’ll find 369 miles of hiking trail, including a couple hundred miles of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail. It happens along 105-mile Skyline Drive through Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park. National Forest access roads can close after a good snow, and while snow removal on highways and roads is generally pretty, short closures can happen. And more than weather can keep you from your destination: construction, accidents, landslides can all close roads, or at least reduce traffic to stop-and-go, increasing your time behind the wheel and minimizing the time your behind is on the trail. 

Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to get current information on road conditions in the Southeast. Below, we list the major road systems we use to access trails and provide a link and a description of the kinds of helpful road information you can find. 

• Blue Ridge Parkway. The thing about the Parkway is that very little of it is maintained in winter: when it does snow or an ice storm hits, the parkway is closed until it melts. Even if there hasn’t been a storm through in a week or more, the parkway, especially its higher reaches — say, from Mount Pisgah west to Waterrock Knob, or from Asheville to Mount Mitchell — can stay closed for long stretches, depending upon the weather. A super-handy feature on the BRP website is a map showing real-time road closures. Stretches of the parkway showing green are open, if it’s red its closed, if it’s yellow it’s under an advisory (fog, for instance). In a column on the left side of the screen you can click on one of 14 areas along the parkway and drill down to that area, simplifying your search. This information is also available in a chart broken down by crossroads and mileposts. Here, you can tell the reason for the closure as well. NOTE: This is also where you can keep tabs on what sections of the Parkway remain closed because of Helene. Short answer: In North Carolina, a lot. 
• Skyline Drive. Virginia’s Skyline Drive does not have a similar real-time road-closure option online. Rather, for road conditions on this 105-mile road through Shenandoah National Park, call: 540-999-3500, option 1, option 1
• Great Smoky Mountains National Park. There aren’t a lot of roads in this half-million-acre National Park, and many of the roads therein have seasonal closures (find those here). Follow current road status updates on Twitter at SmokiesRoadsNPS. Updates are available for Newfound Gap Road (US-441), Little River Road, Laurel Creek Road, and Cades Cove Loop Road.
• NCDOT. North Carolina’s real-time road conditions map includes various layers: you can check by type of road (Interstate, US highway, State Route, Secondary Road), by county, by traffic cameras. You can check to see where there’s current congestion, from construction, from accidents, whatever. And, as is the case with the National Park Service and the Blue Ridge Parkway, this is the place to find out what roads remain closed as a result of Helene.
• VDOT. The Virginia Traffic Information map also includes a variety of layers. Among the helpful tools we especially like is one that lets you judge congestion by traffic speed. Click on “Speeds” and roads where traffic is proceeding at 40 percent or below the posted speed limit will appear black; if people are driving between 40 percent and 60 percent of the speed limit the road will show red, 60-80 percent yellow, and 80 percent or above will show as a green road. There’s also an overlay for Precipitation — rain, ice, snow, a mix — and for road conditions.
• TDOT. Tennessee’s SmartWay program is where you can find weather-related issues and Traffic Delays by degree: click on the Traffic Delays function and the roads appear green for No Delays, orange for Moderate Delays, red for “Traffic” Delays, a deep crimson for Heavy Traffic Delays. It also includes a Waze function with real-time info.
• SCDOT. South Carolina’s 511sc site provides some of the same information plus driving directions, including the quickest way to reach the beach.

Unless you’d rather be listening to podcasts in gridlock than hiking, make friends with these resources and use them before heading out on your next adventure.

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In a nutshell

Here are the key links mentioned above to help you effectively, quickly and safely navigate your way to the trailhead.

• Blue Ridge Parkway: Realtime Road closure map
• Skyline Drive: call 540-999-3500, option 1, option 1.
• Great Smoky Mountains National Park: 
• NCDOT: Real-Time Traffic Conditions here
• VDOT (Virginia): Virginia Traffic Information
• TDOT (Tennessee): SmartWay
• SCDOT (South Carolina): 511SC 

The post Don’t let a closed road ruin your day appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

Today, we offer some of our favorite resources and explain why. Links to these resources are included.  

Scouting, planning, execution

alltrails.com — Where we start when looking at a new trail or area to explore. Of all the crowd-sourced trail sites, we’ve found this one to be the most extensive and most accurate (though not 100 percent so). The free version provides access to the database of trails, including maps and elevation profiles. Go Pro and you can print out maps and download them to your mobile device for GPS tracking in the field. It also lets you map your own route.

Trail status, road conditions

Especially this time of year, when venturing into the high country it’s important to check ahead and make sure the trails, and the roads leading to them, are open. Here are some of the more prominent locations where you may find yourself seeking such information.

• North Carolina State Parks
• Croatan, Nantahala, Pisgah and Uwharrie National Forests
• Virginia State Parks
• Appalachian Trail
• Blue Ridge Parkway
• N.C. Department of Transportation
• Great Smoky Mountains National Park
• North Carolina State Parks
• North Carolina National Forests (Croatan, Pisgah, Nantahala, Uwharrie)
• Virginia Department of Transportation
• Shenandoah National Park
• Virginia National Forests (George Washington and Jefferson)
• Virginia State Parks  

sunrise-sunset.org  — Plug your location into the site and you can find, by date, the start of twilight, sunrise, sunset, end of twilight, day length, solar noon, and the start and end of both nautical twilight and astronomical twilight.

Leave No Trace — Most of us know the basic seven principles of Leave No Trace: 1. Plan Ahead and Prepare; 2. Travel & Camp on Durable Surfaces; 3. Dispose of Waste Properly; 4. Leave What You Find; 5. Minimize Campfire Impacts; 6. Respect Wildlife; 7. Be Considerate of Other Visitors. But do you know what these seven principles entail? Be a better outdoorsy type by becoming better versed in the specifics of Leave No Trace, at the Center for Outdoor Ethics’s Leave No Trace website.

Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail — Looking to hike a portion of the 1,175-mile MST, which runs the length of North Carolina from Clingmans Dome on the Tennessee line to Jockey’s Ridge at the coast? The Friends site includes online guides to the entire trail, guides that tell you, mile by mile, where you can get on and off the trail, where there’s water, what the terrain is like and more. Some recommended day hikes are included.

Fire Weather Intelligence Portal —Developed by the State Climate Office of North Carolina, the Fire Weather Intelligence Portal provides current fire danger ratings throughout North Carolina for 13 states in the Southeast. It assesses fire danger by looking at relative humidity, air temperature, and wind speed and direction.

Campsite Assist — Finding a campsite at the last minute can be a tedious task, especially considering that campsites can be reserved up to a year an advance. But a lot of those reservations get canceled at the last minute, and when they are you can find them on Campsite Assist, a part of CampsitePhotos.com. In fact, they’ll even send you an alert for campsites you express an interest in.

A Virtual Wildflower Garden Across Time — Right about now’s the time spring wildflowers start popping up in the Piedmont. And if you don’t know a trout lily from a trillium, you need to bookmark this site. It helps you identify wildflowers by color, location and by when you’re most likely to see them. Invaluable for any lover of spring.

Skywatching — Is there anything more enthralling than the night sky? You gaze to the heavens on a clear, moonless night and realize — you have no idea what you’re looking at. Unless you have access to space.com‘s Skywatching page. What planets are visible, the constellations, the space station’s path — it’s all here.

General hiking information

Volunteer Vacations — Intrigued by the notion of a “vacation” where you work your behind off to improve the outdoor experience? If so, here’s good news: there are lots of opportunities out there and you can find them on the American Hiking Society’s Volunteer Vacations page.

American Hiking Society — A good resource for all things hiking, especially if you’re just starting out and find yourself full of questions. 

National Trails Day — The first Saturday in June — that would be June 4 this year — we give back to the trails we love, through hundreds of projects nationwide designed to celebrate and enhance our trails. Start checking this site in May for an NTD event near you.

Hiking the AT for $400 — Thinking about hiking the Appalachian Trail? Then you likely have a few questions, questions that likely can be answered on the Appalachian Trail Conservancy’s FAQ page.

Got a few minutes to kill?

fastestknowntimes.com — Until two years ago, FKTs — Fastest Known Times — were limited to the likes of the Appalachian Trail, the Mountains-to-Sea Trail … the big boys. Then the pandemic hit and people found themselves with a lot of free time and the only safe place to spend it outside. Outside, on the trail, going really fast, apparently, because now just about every trail you know has an FKT, which is likely documented here.

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GetHiking! enewsletter

Interested in subscribing to our free weekly enewsletter? In it, you’ll find a man story examining some aspect of trail life, what hikes are upcoming in our eight GetHiking! chapters in North Carolina and Virginia, as well as gear recommendations, media reviews, hiking tips, and even more resources. Sign up by emailing us at info@getgoingnc.com.

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