This week’s focus: Hiking Resources

Follow the sun

We can’t promote the sunrise-sunset.org resource enough: simply 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. Especially helpful this time of year. sunrise-sunset.org

Hiking ABCs from AHS

Let’s say you’re just getting into hiking and you’re one of those folks who make a beeline for trailheads with addresses (see above). Now, having read today’s Tip, you see how knowing those secondary trailheads can be a big plus. But how to find them? And once you find one of these more remote hikes it probably will behoove you to be a little more prepared — after all, there likely will be fewer people around to help should something go awry. You can keep things from going awry — and being prepared if they do — by becoming an informed hiker, and one good way to do that is to check out the American Hiking Society’s Hiking 101 page, where you’ll get tips on everything from the 10 Essentials for your day pack to key outdoor skills to planning your outing. Find it here. 03.18.2021

Smart filming with your smartphone 

So you watch these hiking and backpacking videos (see Media, below) and think, Man, what kind of gear are they shooting with, and how do they get those shots? Sometimes they are shooting with pretty pricey gear. But sometimes they’re shooting with their smartphone. Smartphone video has come a long way, baby, and as Josh the Intern explains in “How to Film a Hiking Video with Just a Smartphone,” with just one additional piece of equipment — a tripod with smartphone mount — you can shoot some pretty inspiring videos yourself. Josh starts with the “establishing shot” and goes from there. Learn more by checking out Josh’s video here. 03.25.2021

Which watches are best

When our Fitbit Charge 4 faded to black earlier in the week we were set to buy a watch better suited to our trail needs. A watch with GPS, a watch with mapping, a watch that hopefully could track key bits of information on our adventures. But which one? And which review to go by? Typically, we go to outdoorgearlab.com to help narrow the field, but their most recent review was from November 2019. We dismissed a couple other reviews because they neglected to mention the price, instead offering a link to Amazon to let you figure it out yourself. Then, we hit on the Treeline Review of “The Best Hiking Watches of 2020.” A year old and slightly out of date, true. But it didn’t mince words declaring its favorites, including “Best Hiking Watch” (Garmin Instinct), “Best Upgrade Hiking Watch” (Garmin fenix 6), “Best Budget Hiking Watch” (Suunto Ambit3 Peak) and “Best Hiking Watch Without GPS (Suunto Core).

Check out the review here. 04.02.2021

The post Wednesday Wisdom: A bevy of hiking resources appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

A dozen summers ago I tried to hike a section of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail off Redwood Road in Raleigh and was quickly thwarted. About 20 yards in, the trail disappeared into a sea of summer growth, of saplings and grasses and ground covers all prospering in the heat of the season. I was bummed, because I’d hiked this stretch, Day-Hike Section P, of the MST several times, but, apparently, every time in winter, when the less hardy species had gone into cold storage. The problem in summer: no one hiked this stretch, in large part because not many folks knew it was there. 

Today, this increasingly popular Falls Lake section of the MST, which runs 2.9 miles from the Hickory Hill Boat Ramp to Cheek Road — gets hiked just enough in summer that the trail is easy to follow. Easy to hike, too: this is one of the flatter sections of the trail along the lake. The trail hugs the mellow contour of the land as it switches from pine forest (mostly upland) to hardwoods closer to the lake. Mellow hiking through successional forest with the occasional view of the lake makes for some fast hiking. One caveat: the trail twice traces the shoulder of two-lane roads — Redwood and Hereford — for about 0.2 miles apiece: There’s plenty of room on the shoulder and not a lot of traffic, but it’s a good thing to know.

Also good to know is that even during a time when it seems everyone has discovered hiking, this stretch of trail still gets hiked “just enough.” I’ve hiked here half a dozen times since March and have seen maybe a half dozen other hikers. 

A great hiking escape when you’re trying to escape other hikers.

Explore!

Check out our video of Day-Hike Section P of the MST along Falls Lake, then check out our GetHiking! Guide to Mountains-to-Sea Trail at Falls Lake (DH-P) at our GetGoingNC guidebook store. Enter code ARP59369 by Wednesday, July 15, and receive the guide for free.

The post Monday, Monday: A run of MST hiked ‘just enough’ appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

But my favorite to date is a simple, local video shot last week by Alex Clarke of Raleigh’s Enloe High School. It’s titled, “A Day in the Life of XC,” and it chronicles a typical training run by members of the school’s cross-country team.

I know it’s a typical run because my stepson is on the team and I frequently press him for details of the day’s run, especially those at Umstead State Park. They never do the same run twice. Some runs include a dip along the way in a Piedmont creek. Some are on trail I didn’t know existed, that they didn’t know existed until it crossed their path. Some include encounters with quicksand. Some runs are  five miles, some turn out to be 13 or more. Ben sleeps especially well after an Umstead workout, though they are workouts in name only. That’s what I love about Alex’s video.

Alex and four teammates dance across logs, they leap across creeks, they tightwalk across the lip of a long-abandoned dam. They play under blue skies, shirts off, in the dead of winter. They find a rope swing along the way. They take a shortcut down a tree trunk. They have a blast. They advocate an inspired approach to working out.

Tag along with Alex and the boys and see if  they don’t make you want to dance across a log as well.

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Today’s 90-Second Escape: Winter’s Light

It can be brilliant, piercing the naked forest like a laser. It can be opaque, almost ominously so. The former making you almost forget the bitter cold, the latter driving it through your bones. Winter’s fickle lighting can make the forest cozy and inviting or gray and bleak, turning a hike from an invigorating romp to a solemn walk. It’s one of the benefits of a winter excursion: you’re never quite sure what you’ll get.

On days such as this past Sunday, at Umstead State Park, you may get both. Leave your Monday behind for a 90 second walk in the winter woods.

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Monday — never an easy time for the outdoors enthusiast. After a weekend of adventure, returning to the humdrum work-a-day world can make one melancholy. To help ease the transition, every Monday we feature a 90 Second Escape — essentially, a 90-second video of a place you’d probably rather be: a trail, a park, a greenway, a lake … anywhere as long as it’s not under a fluorescent bulb.
Today’s 90-Second Escape: Fat Tire Frolick

Is it one of those Monday’s where you just feel like going full speed through a forest? (Or at least my full speed?) Then you’re in luck.
Let’s take a ride.

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