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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Saturday, I observed National Trails Day with the Friends of Mountains-to-Sea Trail, sprucing up Section 20 of the MST along Falls Lake. The specific assignment of our eight-person detachment: pick up the acres of flotsam and jetsam that had accumulated along the trail during high tide. (In the case of Falls Lake, that would be when heavy rains raise the water level, pushing debris to higher ground, where it remains when the water recedes. If you’ve hiked Falls Lake, you’re no doubt familiar with this phenomenon.)

At 1.4 miles in length, Section 20 is one of the smaller sections of the 60-mile MST along Falls Lake. The first sign that we might have a long day was when Jeff Brewer, a vice president with the Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail who was directing the overall NTD effort along Falls Lake, told us we’d been allotted 250 trash bags. Seemed like a lot; we would learn shortly just how many 250 truly was.

Before long, Eric Motzno, trail supervisor for Section 20 and our crew chief for the day, was leading us down the trail off Redwood Road in Durham County. Despite passing under I-85, then marching along side it for a couple hundred yards, Section 20 offers a nice escape typical of Falls Lake: passage through a maturing hardwood forest with occasional glimpses of Falls Lake and more occasional encounters with the hundreds of small creeks and freshets feeding into 28-mile-long Falls Lake. We didn’t get past the first creek, about a quarter mile in, before it was time to get out our orange plastic trash bags and dig in.

The low-lying creeks provide a natural path for trash trying to escape a swollen Falls Lake. Plastic pop bottles, glass liquor bottles, basketballs, soccer balls, a bocce ball, a ping-pong ball. Styrofoam cups, Styrofoam ice chests, pop cans, beer cans. Four tires, still mounted on their rims. Stuff I couldn’t identify, stuff I didn’t want to identify. For six hours: bend, scoop, deposit in orange trash bag, repeat. For a break, we’d haul the trash bags, each weighing 35 to 40 pounds, the quarter mile back up to the road. At one point it occurred to me that rolling the tires up the trail to the road might be fun, so I volunteered to shepherd all four. It was more backbreaking than hauling 80 pounds of bagged trash. I don’t know about my fellow volunteers on Section 20, but I took a perverse pride in realizing we had volunteered for the most physically demanding chore of the day. At day’s end, we had about 80 bursting orange trash bags to show for our efforts, and I had earned a good — and early — night’s sleep. It was the most demanding and rewarding day I’d spent on the trail in a long while.

I tried to get a handle on just how rigorous trail work can be. Libby Wile, who manages volunteer programs for the American Hiking Society, said they haven’t done research on just how physically demanding trail work can be. “Our trips vary in difficulty, in the amount of hiking involved and whether it’s trail maintenance or building a trail, so it’s hard to provide an average for them.”

She was referring specifically to AHS’s Volunteer Vacations. This year, AHS is sponsoring 70 Volunteer Vacations, which generally last a week. Each includes anywhere from 6 to 15 volunteers on trail work projects. Last year, Wile said 420 volunteers took part in their vacation program. The projects are pitched to AHS by various land management agencies (a good deal of them state parks) across the country. (Alas, there are no Volunteer Vacations scheduled in North Carolina this year.) Learn more about the program here. http://www.americanhiking.org/volunteer-vacations/

I didn’t need anyone to tell me that trail work was good exercise; my body was doing a great job of communicating that. I was curious, though, about the amount of energy I’d burned on National Trails Day. It was hard to find an online calorie calculator with this specific task. I did find one that came close: the About.com calorie calculator by occupation, covering everything from working in a bakery and bookbinding to steel mill fettling and forging. The closest activity to what I had done was “Forestry, General,” which for the typical 150-pound person (I’m about 20 pounds north of that) burns about 544 calories — or about 3,264 calories over our six-hour shift. That’s nearly twice what we need to power us through the typical day.

Losing weight and toning up while helping your favorite trail: Not a bad way to spend a Saturday. And you don’t have to wait a year until National Trails Day 2012 for the next session. Hiking clubs and groups such as the Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail hold trail workdays regularly.

To find an upcoming workday near you, check out the hiking clubs list at our sister site, NCHikes.com. If you’re with a hiking club, a friends group or any other group or agency that that has a workday coming up, leave the particulars in our comment box below.

For more on our Saturday’s NTD workday on Falls Lake, I refer you again to our sister site, NCHikes.com.

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