Or this, from a more contemporary purveyor of percipient thought:

“It’s the first day of autumn! A time of hot chocolatey mornings, and toasty marshmallow evenings, and, best of all, leaping into leaves!”

— W. Pooh

But it’s writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, inspired by his New England home, that we think best captures the sentiment of the season: “I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house. So I have spent almost all the daylight hours in the open air.”

That’s pretty much how we approach fall, and why we, too, endeavor to spend so much of it “in the open air” — by backpacking. Warm days, cool nights, cloudless skies and lots of autumnal color make this the season to not just to explore the backcountry, but to live in it. And while that autumnal sunshine is indeed intoxicating, the shoulder periods of dawn and dusk, not to mention those brisk, brilliant night skies, make fall the true season of backpacking.

How are we planning to spend as much of this fall as possible outdoors? In a variety of ways. And ways that nearly every one of you can be a part of, regardless of your backpacking experience — if any.

For the more experienced

Got a bit of backpacking experience under your belt? We have two four-day trips on tap.

• Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock/Citico Creek Wilderness, Sept. 16-19. On this basecamp backpack trip we hike in 1.5 miles and establish camp, then spend three days day hiking these adjoining wilderness areas. $195. Learn more and sign up here.
• Appalachian Trail at Standing Indian, Oct. 28-31. We spend Thursday evening at the Standing Indian campground, then head out Friday morning for three days on the trail, mostly the AT as it follows a horseshoe-shaped ridge over Albert Mountain and Standing Indian Mountain. $195. Learn more and sign up here.

For those short on time

Fall rolls around, you’re out of vacation time. With our Weekend Quick Escapes, you don’t need any PTO; these trips are designed to let you work a full day, then, when the whistle blows at 5, hop into your loaded car and drive to a trailhead requiring a short hike in to basecamp and two days of hiking in daypacks. Our three destinations for fall:

• Doughton Park, Oct. 22-24.  $105. Learn more and sign up here.
• Rock Castle Gorge, Nov. 19-21. $105. Learn more and sign up here.
• Birkhead Mountain Wilderness in the Uwharrie National Forest, Dec. 10-1. $105. Learn more and sign up here.

Backpacking for Non Backpackers

You’re an avid hiker but, for whatever reason, have yet to try backpacking. With our Basecamp Backpack option you can enjoy the best of both worlds: the solitude of a backcountry campsite plus the ability to hike miles on end without 40 pounds on your back. We supply the basic backpacking gear — backpack, tent, sleeping pad, cook stove and cookset, plus guidance on how to use it all and be a backpacker. This option is available on our Basecamp Backpack trips that require a short hike — between a quarter mile and 3 miles — to camp in full pack. We provide a list of everything you’ll need to bring.

• Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock/Citico Creek Wilderness, Sept. 16-19. $295. Learn more and sign up here
• Weekend Quick Escape: Doughton Park, Oct. 22-24. $195. Learn more and sign up here
• Weekend Quick Escape: Rock Castle Gorge, Nov. 19-21. $195. Learn more and sign up here.
• Weekend Quick Escape: Birkhead Mountain Wilderness in the Uwharrie National Forest, Dec. 10-12. $195. Learn more and sign up here.

Backpacking for backpackers-to-be

Not a backpacker — yet? In just three sessions you can become a bonafide backpacker in time for the prime fall hiking season. We start with a gear session via Zoom, then meet for a 5-hour, in-field training session before our weekend graduation trip to South Mountains State Park. Some loaner gear is available on a first-requested basis. We have four sessions scheduled for the fall. Click the appropriate link for details and to sign up. $225.

• Intro to Backpacking: Charlotte. Sept. 8, 11, 24-26
• Intro to Backpacking: Triangle. Sept. 8, 11, 24-26
• Intro to Backpacking: Triad. Sept. 8, 11; Oct. 1-3
• Intro to Backpacking: Greenville. Sept. 23; Oct. 9, 22-24

Of all the seasons, fall is the last you can afford to waste. As noted horticulture writer Elizabeth Lawrence — the first woman, in 1932, to graduate with a degree in landscape architecture from N.C. State — put it, “I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.”

The post Backpacking squeezes the most out of fall appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

It’s been cool most of the week throughout our blogging area, and it will be cool again at least on Saturday, making this the perfect summer weekend to get in a hike.

Mount Jefferson Downhill Skateboarding Event, Saturday and Sunday, starts at 9 a.m. both days, Mount Jefferson State Natural Area, West Jefferson. Scratching your head, are you? Here’s the deal: The 1.6-mile road to the summit of 4,683-foot Mount Jefferson will be closed to vehicles both days to accommodate the mountain’s annual downhill skateboard race. Yup, youngsters on skateboards — more than 100 of ‘em — will skateboard down the mountain, dropping more than 700 vertical feet along the way. However, there will be shuttle service to the top of the mountain: park at the Lowe’s in West Jefferson and take a shuttle to the top, where you can hike the park’s 5 miles of trail. And you can check out the race as well. (FYI, one of the sponsors for the race, the Ian Tilmann Foundation, will be giving helmets to the first 100 kids who sign a pledge to wear a helmet while skateboarding.) Learn more about the race here and hiking at Mount Jefferson here.

Ranger-led Hike on the Profile Trail, Sunday, 10 a.m., Grandfather Mountain State Park,  Banner Elk. Think of Grandfather Mountain and you think of winging bridges and wild weather. That’s all on top of the mountain. At the base, on the massif’s northwest flank, lies the start of the Profile Trail, which revels in stately Southern Appalachian hardwoods and tranquil hiking. Join a ranger to explore this softer side of old Grandad on a 2-mile, 2-hour hike. Learn more and sign up here.

Sunday Morning Birdwalk, Sunday, 8 a.m., Eno River State Park, Durham. Ever walk through the woods in the early morning, hear the avian chatter and wonder who’s talking — and what they’re saying. Eavesdrop with a ranger on this leisurely 2-mile hike. Learn more and sign up here.

GetHiking! this weekend

What are our GetHiking! groups in North Carolina and Virginia up to this weekend? Plenty, thanks for asking …

Live the video

The Joyce Kilmer/Slickrock Wilderness in the Nantahala National Forest, coupled with the adjoining Citico Creek Wilderness in adjoining Tennessee, make up more than 35,000 acres of some of the wildest terrain on the East Coast. GetBackpacking! spent four days exploring the wilderness this past weekend, and will return next year. Until then, learn more about the area’s trails here.

More options

Looking for more options for weekend adventure? Check out our GetOut! Find An Adventure resource page here.

The post GetOut! Your Friday Nudge for Weekend Adventure appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

“Downed tree,” I’d yell. The caution was relayed down the line. One by one we’d make our way over, under, around or through the massive poplars and chestnut oaks that criss-crossed the trail. Progress was excruciatingly slow: what on a maintained trail in a state or national park might have been an hour-and-half 5-mile descent to Wildcat Falls, our objective, was going to take close to three times that.

Well, I thought, they wanted a wilderness experience.

And they did.

That was fun. Now what?

We launched GetBackpacking! four years ago as a way to introduce hikers to backcountry adventure. Getting into backpacking, we realized, was daunting, fraught by multitude of myths: the equipment is heavy, I’ll be eating berries and grubs, I’ll have to sleep on the hard ground. Worse, most people’s introduction came at the hands of experienced “friends” who had little sympathy or patience for a beginner. One of my favorite stories is that of an experienced backpacker who took a friend for the first time and loaned him a pack. The friend had a devil of a time getting the pack to cooperate: it wouldn’t balance, the shoulder straps dug into his shoulders, the hip belt was practically non-existent. “Oh,” it’s a terrible pack, the ythe experienced backpacker readily admitted. “It’s why I don’t use it anymore.”

So we developed a way to ease people into disappearing into the woods for days on end with everything they’d need to survive, and do so comfortably. 

It’s a funny thing about those beginners, though: they eventually want to go on more challenging trips. So we started exploring sections of the surprisingly rugged Uwharrie Mountains, of doing sections of the Appalachian Trail, of exploring Wilson Creek, and, eventually, Linville Gorge, recognized in East Coast backpacking circles as one of the toughest hikes around. After doing Linville for a couple years, they wanted to know, “What else ya got?”

So we took them to the Joyce Kilmer/Slickrock/Citico Creek Wilderness.

Too rugged for logging

Word has it that when Ponce de Leon passed through far western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee in the 1500s on his way up from Florida, his expedition took one look at these rugged mountains and decided to detour around them. The Cherokee traveled through the region, but never settled. Even the voracious timber industry that plowed its way through the Southern Appalachians a century ago made little headway here in the Unicoi Mountains. There are higher mountains in the Southeast — we topped out at 5,300 feet on Stratton Bald, 1,300 feet below Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountain Crest — and Linville has a more swashbuckling reputation, but this 33,620-acre wilderness has a personality all its own. A personality with a wry sense of humor.

After hiking in a half mile or so in on Thursday the trail was blocked by a tumble of recently downed hardwoods. A variety of techniques — the turtle, the slow high-hurdle, the hug-and-roll — were used to navigate the downfall. Whew! we thought. Twenty-five yards later we rounded a bend and — oy! Again, we transformed from hikers to scramblers. The pattern repeated for a half mile: a stretch of teasing open trail, a roadblock. We get it — now please let us through. And the trail did, just as the last light of day was fading over Naked Ground.

Naked Ground, our basecamp for three nights, sits in a gap at 4,860 feet between 5,249-foot Haoe mountain to the northeast and 5,341-foot Stratton Bald to the southwest. It’s a lovely flat area, and easy to picture as the temporary trading ground (think modern flea market) that it was centuries ago. Today, it’s a confluence of trails, of Naked Ground Tail, of Slickrock Creek Trail, of Hangover Lead Trail. Finding them, though, amid the waist-high foliage proved a challenge in itself. After a false start or two we finally located Slickrock Creek Trail, which dropped about 2,900 vertical feet in 5 miles to our lunch spot, at Wildcat Falls. A Southern Appalachian Wilderness Society trail crew we met later told us there were at least 30 trees — big trees — down on that section. What we were expecting to be a two-hour descent at most took twice that. When we reached the confluence of Big Fat Gap and Slickrock Creek a little after 1 p.m., with 5.5 miles of uphill still to go, it was too late to tack on the extra little bit downstream to Wildcat Falls, a series of four drops (besides, we’d long since eaten). And that, curiously, was fine with our hikers. Here, I believe, is why.

A more natural forest 

Everyone loves a waterfall, but we see a lot of waterfalls on our trips. The endless drops on Gragg Prong and the into-the-abyss South Harper Creek Falls at Wilson Creek, the series of drops as the Linville River loses 2,000 vertical feet in 13 miles through Linville Gorge, the numerous falls in Panthertown Valley that contribute to it’s chamber-of-commerce nickname as the Yosemite of the East. A good waterfall would have been nice. But that’s not the allure of Joyce Kilmer/Slickrock.

What draws people to this remote outpost is the promise of virgin forest, a promise fulfilled mostly in the 3,800-acre Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest, where trees, some more than 400 years old, reach heights of 100 feet or more. But the JKMF isn’t part of the wilderness and it has a peculiarly sterile feel, almost like a museum of really big trees. They stand as if on display, and seem oddly out of context.   

There are only small pockets of virgin forest in the adjoining Slickrock Creek Wilderness. When you enter them, though, you feel that something is different: there are fewer trees, their more stately, there’s less understory and the light dims slightly. Passing through a small mountainside of old growth on Jenkins Meadow Trail, I caught up with Biju. “That was old growth,” I said. He stopped and turned, his eyes big. “I know,” he smiled. “You could sense it.”

These old growth oases are worth the effort it takes to penetrate a wilderness. But what I find really inspiring exploring Slickrock and other wilderness areas is what you won’t see: plants that don’t belong. The dearth of outside visitors with commercial intent, the absence of development (especially by the invading Europeans) means fewer invasive species have been introduced to dominate the landscape. While whacking down the Slickrock Creek Trail and squeezing through especially tight passages over Stratton Bald and Hangover Lead I was struck by the diversity: within 20 feet there must have been 40 different plant species — that I could see — living in harmony. Maybe they weren’t all native, but none had the step-aside audacity of, say, Japanese stilt grass or kudzu. It was a naturalist’s dream. A hiker’s, too.

We’ll be back

It was a challenging four days of hiking. The 75 or so downed trees we had to negotiate, the tight squeezes through overgrown trail, the seemingly endless climbs. We were graced with good weather, though: the one two-hour rainstorm we endured came after we’d gotten back to camp and eaten: we were able to crawl into our tents and nap, read, listen to podcasts while the rain drummed away on our tents. When the Jenkins Meadow Trail came to an end Sunday and we were back at our cars, we were glad to be there — at least for the time being.

“So,” Henry asked as we prepared for the long drive home, “will we be coming back here again this fall? Or will this be a once a year thing?”

Once a year, I was about to say. Then I thought about all the terrain left to explore both here and across the way in the adjoining Citico Creek Wilderness.

I smiled. “We’ll see.”

Explore with us

It may be next year before we return to Joyce Kilmer/Slickrock/Citico Creek. But we’ve got a lot of trips until then:

GetBackpacking! Wild, Wonderful Wilson Creek, Aug. 2-4, Wilson Creek area of the Pisgah National Forest. This trip is less about hiking with weight on your back, more about setting up basecamp and exploring and enjoying the waterfalls and views in the Wilson Creek area, Mortimer. Learn more and sign up here.

GetHiking! Classic Escapes: Standing Indian and the AT, Aug. 15-18, Standing Indian Recreation Area, Nantahala National Forest, Franklin. From our car camp basecamp, we’ll do hikes of 10+ miles on Friday and Saturday, do a shorter waterfall hike Sunday before breaking camp and heading home. Learn more and sign up here.

GetBackpacking! Linville Gorge: Advanced Skills, Linville Gorge Wilderness, Linville, Aug. 23-25. Our annual pilgrimage into one of the wildest spots on the East Coast involves a night of camping on the rim, one night in the gorge, two river crossings, and a heckuva challenge. Learn more and sign up here.

GetBackpacking! Intro to Backpacking, training on Saturday, Sept. 14, at Morrow Mountain State Park, graduation trip to South Mountains State Park Oct. 4-6. Not a backpacker but intrigued? Our class begins with a two-hour gear session at a Great Outdoor Provision Co. near you, progresses to a five-hour training session at Morrow Mountain State Park, and culminates with a two-night graduation trip to South Mountains. Learn more and sign up here.

The post Joyce Kilmer/Slickrock: Wilderness Defined 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

The post Finding new places for you to explore appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

The photo was taken last August on a GetBackpacking! trip into Linville Gorge. It was a three-day, 22-mile trip that involved two crossings of the Linville River, a knee-busting descent into Chimney Gap followed by a calf-burning ascent out, navigating a river section that had little interest in being navigated, and this drop into the gorge on the Leadmine Trail—a path that looked relatively innocuous on the topo map. In reality, it’s a path best tackled by tossing your pack down the mountain first, then scooting down after it. You know how trails rarely look as steep in photos? Not this one.

The weekend was filled with moments like this—moments, when, had a plank been handy in this raucous assemblage of rock, rhododendron and roiling water, I might have been asked to take a walk.

Yet late Sunday afternoon, when we returned to the trailhead, the requests began: We gotta do this again! (Perhaps not immediately, but within a couple days.)

We gotta do this again!

Was it because we had great weather?

A month later at Wilson Creek, it rained most of the weekend. We saw the sun when we met at the Visitor Center, but it had disappeared by the time we reached the trailhead 20 minutes later, never to return. Yet same thing: We gotta come back.

Part of what draws us back is the promise of the truly memorable. On a trip earlier this year in the Uwharries, we camped in the clearing atop Little Long Mountain and watched day ever-so-slowly fade to night, then sat star-struck beneath a brilliant winter sky devoid of clouds and much light pollution. Likewise, a trip on the AT in February found us crossing Max Patch on a cloudless day, the mountains of Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia sleepily rippling into the distance. If you’ve ever done the 14-mile stretch of AT between Carver’s Gap and US 19E on a sunny day, you know all about the truly memorable.

The evening campfire, the electronic detachment, the dehydrated meals that are the best ever, and the simplicity — wake, eat, walk, make camp, eat, sleep — make things like daylong rain and a sketchy trail seem a small price to pay. 

Here on the cusp of the 2018 backpacking season, we are especially excited about the adventures ahead, which include:

• Return to Linville Gorge
• Return to Wilson Creek
• Five-day trip to the Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock Wilderness / Citico Creek Wilderness on the North Carolina / Tennessee line.
• A weekend trip on the aforementioned AT from Roan Mountain/Carver’s Gap to US 19E
• A series of summer weekend trips on the AT in Virginia, from roughly Peaks of Otter north to the Crabtree Falls area.
• Backpackers’ choice. Got a trip you want to do in the Southeast? Nominate it, we’ll put it to a vote and make it happen.

Maybe you’re not a backpacker, but would like to be. Our GetBackpacking! Intro to Backpacking class includes a 2-hour gear and packing session, a 5-hour field-training session (covering, among other things, setting up and breaking down camp, and food and the cooking thereof), followed by a weekend graduation trip to South Mountains State Park.

Or maybe you’re not quite sure you want to be a backpacker, but you’re intrigued. We have a new GetBackpacking! Overnight Sampler that serves as an introduction to staying overnight in the outdoors and hiking with a loaded backpack. Minimal commitment: we provide packs, tents, cooking gear and food on an overnight trip.

Backpacking isn’t for everyone. But if you’ve ever felt that a day on the trail ended too soon, and only because the sun was going down, then you’re a candidate for an extended backcountry stay. Give it a try. 

Our GetBackpacking! team looks forward to exploring with you this year.

Happy trails,

Joe

Get out!

Not all of the trips mentioned above have been scheduled; when they are, you can learn about them through our weekly GetHiking! enewsletter and our monthly GetBackpacking! enewsletter.  Sign up here for our GetHiking! enewsletter, and here for our GetBackpacking! enewsletter.

Our next GetBackpacking! Intro to Backpacking class begins the first week of May, with local gear clinics, followed by a field-training session at Morrow Mountain State Park on May 5, and graduation weekend May 25-27 at South Mountains State Park. Learn more and sign up here.

Our next GetBackpacking! Overnight Sampler is Saturday, June 9 at Eno River State Park in Durham. Learn more and sign up here.

The post Get Out and Backpack appeared first on GetGoing NC!.