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’s 90-Second Escape: Isolation.

The Federal Aviation Administration has decided, after years of thinking otherwise, that our portable electronic devises really don’t pose a threat to safe airline communications. We are now able to read ebooks, play games and watch videos on our PEDs pretty much whenever we want on commercial flights. Overall, flyers seem happy with the decision.

Now, the FAA is contemplating letting people use their cell phones when a flight is above 10,000 feet. People are not so happy about this potential development. Stuck in seat B between Seat A talking for three hours about how much he tipped the cabbie and why, and Seat C blabbering for three hours about her visit with her mother-in-law? Why not just offer mandatory root canals on every flight? One critic of the idea says the backlash is due to the fact that inflight is one of the few opportunities we have to escape the ever-present jibber-jabber wrought by the cell phone. It is, she said, our silent sanctuary in the sky.

Today, we bring 90 seconds of that sanctuary down to Earth. Stuck somewhere — on a bus, in an elevator, in a restaurant — amid the jawboning masses? Pull out your PED and your headphones, plug in, and enjoy 90 seconds of escape.

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Today’s 90-Second Escape: Getting There

OK, this is a little cheesy, a little last-minute, a bit OMG-I-Need-90-Seconds-of-…-Something. I could call it edgy cinema with the hand-held, cinema verite feel, but really it’s just dicey craftsmanship. And I could go on about the existential nature of getting there vs. being there, about how it’s as much about the journey as the destination, blah blah blah, but really, it’s just about hopping in the car to get to where we need to be. But mostly, it’s about the 90-Second/OMG thing. Anyway, here’s 90 seconds of the 10-minute ride I take to get to where I play the most, Umstead State Park in the heart of the Triangle.

For something that is a little more profound, though, come back after noon today and we’ll clue you in to a new project we’re launching. If you’re looking forward to the fall as much as we are, you’ll want to check it out.

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