Here’s our annual note for when the temperature seems too cold to hike.
Tomorrow morning the forecast calls for a temperature in the upper teens, rising to maybe 40. But it will be sunny, and a little sun can make up for a lot of cold.
North Carolina has, on average, 28 clear days every winter; only seven states see more cloudless days, according to data compiled from two climate agencies. Virginia averages 25 clear days. In short, you could live in much worse places to avoid feeling SAD
All the leaves are gone and the sky is gray, meaning it’s time for our annual lecture on winter hiking. This is the tips for comfortable winter hiking lecture, not the why-you-should-do-it lecture.
We love winter hiking. Why? We’ll refer you to this post from two years ago to explain why. Today, as we do every year at this time, we trot out our tips for how you can take the perceived discomfort out of winter hiking, making it possible to better appreciate what to many hikers is the sport’s lost season.
We’ve reached late fall, the transition between glorious fall hiking and winter, a period many see as a three-month hiatus from the trail. Why? Well, we know not why: for us, it has become our favorite season to be on the trail. It’s a topic we’ve waxed on at length; here, for instance.
We rerun this post, tweaked and updated, around this time of year to help minimize the chances of finding a closed road leading to your favorite trailhead, especially your favorite mountain trailhead.
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:
Today we revisit a topic we first wrote in 2012: 10 of our favorite winter hikes. Hikes that, for various reasons, are especially good hiked in cold weather. For some (at the coast, for instance, it’s the only time you can hike them, lest you have an immunity to squadrons of dive-bombing mosquitoes and an unusually high tolerance for things that slither. For others, it may be a view otherwise obscured by a lush, full forest, or for the opportunity to hike in evergreen conditions, or because of exposed terrain that lets winter’s warming sun shine in. IMPORTANT NOTE: For mountain hikes especially check to make sure the trail is open; many mountain hikes remain closed as a result of Hurricane Helene.
