Brent Laurenz, executive director of the Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, pretty much summed up the situation in Western North Carolina in an email sent to the Friends group earlier this week:
“In the coming weeks and months, we will be surveying the trail and assessing damage, but trail restoration is a very low priority in light of the ongoing humanitarian crisis facing western North Carolina … it is likely that sections of the trail will remain closed for a significant length of time.”
If you’re not doing anything a week from Saturday … it’s nobody’s fault but your own.
A week from Saturday, June 4, the first Saturday in June, is National Trails Day. As it’s been since its inception in 1993, it’s a day set side for us to celebrate our nation’s trails at NTD-designated events, of which there are 368 nationwide.
Face it, after this weekend you’ll be hard-pressed to find time to get out and release your stress; once the holidays hit, your time will be spoken for. That said, here are three opportunities for pre-holiday adventure that you shouldn’t pass up.
Coast
Beavers can be quick to judge.
I realized this Sunday at Falls Lake as I crossed a lengthy boardwalk leading to the footbridge over Little Lick Creek. Normally, Lick Creek is maybe 12 to 15 feet across. But after a good rain, like we’d had the past two days, the surrounding wetlands are flooded. Hence, the lead-up boardwalk on this section of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail in Durham County.
I heard a spectacular splash and looked up to see a radiating circle of disturbed water about 25 yards north of the bridge. At the base of the bridge, on a spit of land that wasn’t submerged, stood a man holding loppers who also was checking out the splash. Moments later the beaver slapped again.
“She’s mad at me,” offered Gregory Scott. Undeservedly so.
Scott is one of the hundreds of volunteers responsible for blazing and maintaining the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, the 950-mile work-in-progress that will one day link Clingman’s Dome on the Tennessee line with Jockey’s Ridge
We stood in a circle, this group mostly in our 50s, 60s and 70s, but I couldn’t help feeling like I was 8 again, shuffling nervously in a schoolyard playground. Our team leaders were choosing work crews, but it had the unmistakable feel of picking teams for a pickup football game.
