Winter is a season disliked more in anticipation than in reality.

That dislike begins the first day of summer. Though we generally do spend the summer solstice reveling in the most daylight of the year — 14 hours, 35 minutes and 8 seconds — in the back of our minds we know that it’s all downhill from here. The day after the solstice we’ll be down to 14 hours, 35 minutes and 6 seconds, two seconds that we won’t actually notice, but two seconds that we’re shorted all the same. 

Sunlight’s demise continues, a matter of mere seconds a day at first, but by a minute a day come mid-July and two minutes a day by the end of August. Before you know it we’re back to Standard Time and you’re leaving work in the dark.

Meanwhile, something else is happening that puts winter in a new light: perihelion. That’s the point at which Earth’s slightly elliptical orbit brings us closest to the sun. Not appreciably closer, thankfully, or there’d be trouble. But just enough that the sun’s rays are a bit brighter. Coupled with it’s more southerly arc through the sky, an arc that lets sunshine knife sideways through the forest rather than from overhead and you’ve got a winter forest brighter and more vivid than at any other time of the year. Think about it: little if any canopy overhead to block the light, light bypassing what canopy there is by sneaking around the side.

Sunday afternoon we hiked the popular Buckquarter Creek/Holden Mill figure-8 loop at Eno River State Park. About half the hike is along a ridge, the other along the Eno. On the Buckquarter Creek ridge segment I stopped and looked down to the Eno, engorged by two days of rain. It ran fast, it churned, it was alive. A lone canoe made its way cautiously downstream. In summer, the view would have been blocked by green, what chatter there might be from the summer-choked Eno absorbed before it could reach the ridge. The season also let me see across the river to the rise leading up to 690-foot Cox Mountain, the highest point in the park. Climbing the Cox Mountain Trail you get a sense of its nearly 300-foot elevation gain, but seeing it in its entirety you appreciate the rise even more so. 

Later, on the longer climb up Holden Mill Trail the trunks of the mature hardwoods cast surprisingly long, surprisingly distinct shadows across the slope rising up from the river. Along the river, the whitecaps off the roiling water managed to sparkle.

Winter isn’t a season enjoyed exclusively along this stretch of the Eno. Other spots where winter is especially good at working its magic:

• Birkhead Mountain Wilderness of the Uwharrie National Forest, Asheboro. More than once I’ve heard the Birkhead area denounced as “not very intersting.” Try it in winter, when long views expose the ancient mountain chain’s still robust slopes. A particular favorite is the Camp 3 Trail, hiking up from North Prong. It’s a gradual mile-long rise through a nearly all hardwood forest nearly devoid of downfall. 
• Eno River State Park: Pump Station Trail, Durham. This trail is best-known for the sheltered basin it skims, which hosts one of the best spring wildflower shows in the region. In winter, you fully appreciate that shelter, in the form of a steep, wooded rim rising high on its south side. How high is a mystery: you can’t see the top.
• Pilot Mountain State Park: Mountain Trail, Pinnacle. Circling much of the base of the mountain, the southern and western exposures capitalize from the direct, sideways sun to illuminate a hardwood forest dominated by chestnut oak, which can grow to more than 100 feet in height. Another plus: most visitors stick to the top of the mountain, further enhancing the winter quiet below.
• Crowders Mountain State Park: Ridgeline Trail. Like Pilot Mountain, the two “peaks” here — The Pinnacle and Crowders — attract the bulk of the adoring masses. That leaves lots of quiet time on the 6.2-mile Ridgeline Trail linking the main part of the park with South Carolina. As its name suggests, it’s ridgeline passage allows plenty of downslope views, to the north and south.
• Butner-Falls Lake Game Lands, north of Raleigh. When we can’t get to the coast for our fix of flat hiking through wide-open spaces, we head to this 40,000-acre preserve located largely along the north shore of Falls Lake. A network of limited-access dirt and gravel roads take you past open fields of corn and millet and through bottomland forest dominated by elderly behemoths, all under a vast, usually blue, sky.

Winter is here, the anxious anticipation is over. Get out and savor the season.

More info

To learn more about the places mentioned today, click the appropriate link, where appropriate:

• Eno River State Park
• Pilot Mountain State Park
• Crowders Mountain State Park
• Birkhead Mountain Wilderness. Your best bet for navigating the entire Uwharrie National Forest, including the Birkhead Mountain Wilderness, is with the “Uwharrie Lakes Region Trail Guide,” by Don Childrey (Earthbound Sports). Learn more here.
• Butner-Falls Lake Game Lands. Resources for exploring any game lands in North Carolina are limited; generalized maps showing boundaries and access points can be found on the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission web site, here. Because getting around here can be a challenge, we’ve added it to our GetHiking! Winter Wild series of (mostly) off-trail hikes. Our Butner hike is this Saturday (Jan. 11). Learn more and sign up here.

The post Winter: Dread it, enjoy it appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

North Carolina

1. Jones Lake State Park

Bay Trail, 4 miles

Easy

Elizabethtown

Hiking clockwise from the Visitor Center: On a particularly cold but sunny day you’ll love the first part of this loop around the lake as it passes through an exposed pine savannah, where lots of warming sunlight bounces off the forest’s sandy floor. By the time the trail reaches the midpoint and loops back, you’ll be warm enough not to mind that the sun has been blocked by a dense sea of bay trees and pond cypress.

More info here.

2. Nags Head Woods Ecological Preserve

Blueberry Ridge Trail, 3.75 miles

Moderate

Nags Head

This 420-acre preserve was spared in 1992 by The Nature Conservancy and the Town of Nags Head, thus saving one of the largest remaining maritime forests along the East Coast. A favorite way to explore the preserve and get a sense of its more than 550 plant species (including oaks more than 500 years old) and 50 known species of butterflies, is on the 3.75-mile Blueberry Ridge Trail.

More info here.

3. Carolina Beach State Park

Sugarloaf Trail, 3 miles

Easy

Carolina Beach

How much eco-diversity can a person take on one 3-mile hike? Carolina Beach puts that question to the test, starting you off from the marina trailhead with a hike along the tidal marsh banks of the Cape Fear River, then through a coastal evergreen forest, a coastal fringe sandhills forest, a longleaf pine savannah and to the top of 60-foot-high Sugarloaf Dune, which is forested now but once proved an excellent spy tower for spotting Union ships sneaking into Wilmington.

More info here.

4. Fort Fisher State Recreation Area

Basin Trail (a k a Hermit Trail), 2.2 miles

Easy

Kure Beach

It’s 2.2 miles roundtrip and it features an abandoned WW II bunker. Of course it’s abandoned, you say — the war ended more than 70 years ago. In fact, it’s only been abandoned since the early 1970s; before that, it was occupied for several years by the Fort Fisher Hermit, a recluse who took up residence in the bunker for more than a decade. And that’s just one reason to hike this trail. The other is at trail’s end: a sweeping view of where the Cape Fear River blends into the Atlantic Ocean amid the Zeke’s Island reserve.

More info here.

5. Merchants Millpond State Park

Lassiter Trail, 6 miles

Moderate

Gatesville

Six miles, you fret, that might be a little long. Or it might not, for two reasons. One, this meandering trail navigates a swamp (the wetter sections are elevated by boardwalk), and nothing makes a hike zip by like the prospect of running into the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Truly, there’s something enchanting and weird about hiking along ponds carpeted in duckweed and harboring bald cypress and tupelo gum dripping with Spanish moss, and through a bevy of other aquatic plants Seussian in nature. So much to see, even in winter.

More info here.

Virginia

1. First Landing State Park

Cape Henry Trail, 6.1 miles

Moderate

Virginia Beach

Hard to believe a popular trail in a popular state park can offer seclusion, but this one does, as it encompasses stretches of dense forest, marsh and swamp. And, because the trail is wide and generally smooth, you can pay attention to these great features along the way rather than having to watch where you step. Good for either a peppy aerobic jaunt or an easy saunter to take in nature.

More info here.

2. York River State Park

Taskinas Trail, 2 miles

Easy

Williamsburg

You might think that an estuary where salt and fresh water combine to create a habitat rich in marine and plant life would be a paddler’s paradise, and it is. But with 30 miles of trail, it’s also a great place to explore on foot, to learn about the rich natural and cultural history (the park houses fossil beds and Colonial and Native American artifacts) and to experience the quiet of a coastal winter. The Taskinas Trail offers a good introduction.

More info here.

3. Great Dismal Swamp

Various canal trails

Easy

Suffolk

The fan of short hikes will like this trail for the same reason the long hiker likes it: how far you go is up to you. Hike 30 minutes out from the refuge office, or from Jericho Lane, or Big Entry Ditch, then turn and hike back. This is hiking for the mind: long passages of quiet, flat trail with minimal distraction.

More info here.

Check out our GetHiking! and GetExploring! hikes at the coast:

• GetHiking! Virginia Beach: Northwest River Park, 5.5 miles on the Indian Creek Trail, Otter Point Trail and the Molly Mitchell Trail., Southeastern Chesapeake. Sunday, Feb. 4, 10 a.m. More info and sign up here.
• GetExploring Greenville: Trailblaze Challenge Training Hike at A Time for Science, 6 miles, Grifton. Saturday, Feb. 10, 10 a.m. Open to all hikers. More info and sign up here.
• For more coastal hikes in North Carolina, consult “100 Classic Hikes in North Carolina” (2007, Mountaineers), here.

Happy trails,

Joe

The post As winter plugs along, hike the coast appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

We like to ward off the beginning of the work-week blues with a thought about life on the outside.

Its skies are milky, indifferent. Its landscape monochromatic, a wash of grays and browns. Its weather harsh at times.And Lord knows the season is stingy with sunlight. The stuff of travel & tourism ad campaigns winter is not.

Perhaps that’s exactly why winter succeeds with so many of us, those who ignore her gruff exterior and go out and play with her anyway.

Take those prevailing milky skies, a blur of clouds without intention. I’m not going to rain on you, they say. I’m not going to shine on you, either. Rather, winter’s skies provide a soft focus that belies threat. Tolerant, if not welcoming, they are, in an unexpected way.

Those filtering skies highlight the bland terrain. Seemingly bland. Brown isn’t typically a color known for nuance. Yet the run-out of leaves surrendered to the forest floor yields a carpet ranging from Desert Storm beige, to Crayola brown, to a sort of Trumpian orange. Nondescript colors on their own, they mix to offer a certain pop.

There are lessons to be learned from the winter woods. The resilient beech leaf (we forgot to add coppery to the carpet pallet) that refuses to give up its post until its replacement arrives in spring. The cheerful holly and pines that retain their cheery green despite the cold. The occasional mis-placed mountain laurel that assures us it’s ok to live outside our comfort zone.

In the bare winter woods, you can see so much more, so much farther. There are few secrets here, few places to hide: what you see is what you get. It’s stark, honest. A place of reassurance.

And there’s the quiet. So quiet you can hear a squirrel scratch its head the next ridge over as it puzzles over where it stashed its acorns just two months earlier. So quiet you hear a breeze rustle the distant tree tops minutes before it brushes your cheek. So quiet you can hear yourself think.

When we dream of our dream hike, we picture a mountain meadow dotted with wildflowers backdropped against the bluest of skies. We picture ourself laying in the midst of this idyll, head propped on our daypack, capped pulled over our eyes, arms crossed over our chest in the international prone sign of contentment. It is, alas, a scene that rarely meets expectations.

Unlike a day in the winter woods.

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Why do you love the winter woods?

We’ve made our case; now we’d like to hear why you love hiking in the winter. Keep your explanation short, 100 words or so. Send it to us by Monday, Dec. 19 at noon, and we’ll share your replies the following week. The one that tickles us most earns a $25 gift card from Great Outdoor Provision Co.

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Walk vs. Hike?

A couple weeks back, we pondered the difference between a “walk” and a “hike.” To us the difference is simply the surface upon which you perambulate: you “walk” on pavement, “you” “hike” on natural surface. We noted that others, such as Robert Moor, author of “On Trails: An Exploration,” have a more introspective take. And you, we asked? How do you differentiate between the two?

There was agreement that a walk becomes a hike when you switch from pavement to gravel. There were exacting standards as well: one person offered that it becomes a hike if a Nalgene bottle is involved.

But our favorite definition came Sunday during a preview of the Triangle Land Conservancy’s Brumley Forest Nature Preserve in Hillsborough. It didn’t take TLC member Pam Hathaway of Holly Springs long to come up with an answer: “If I put a 10-pound pack on my back, it’s a hike.”

To Pam goes a $25 gift card to Great Outdoor Provision Co.

The post Winter: Low Expectations — and High Rewards appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

Today’s 90-Second Escape: Winter Hike?

There was some pretty good thunder and lightening throughout the land last week. This being winter, we have to wonder whether the old wive’s tale will hold true and we’ll be walking in a winter wonderland sometime in the next few days. (The forecast, fyi, suggests this will not be the case. Still … .)

In case you’ve forgotten what a snow hike is like, we bring you 90 seconds of such from a couple years back.

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With the current forecast in mind, here are some possibilities for Saturday (though be sure to call ahead and check websites before heading out, since some venues remained closed as of noon Thursday).

Coast

Here’s something suited to the current weather that isn’t likely to get canceled: the 11th Annual Polar Plunge at Kure Beach. There’s also a 5K, live music, silent auctions, food and more, all benefiting Special Olympics New Hanover County. Plus, the water will likely seem not nearly as cold as it is.

Logistics: Saturday, Feb. 21, 11 a.m., Kure Beach Pavilion, Kure Beach. $20-$40. More info here.

Saturday forecast: Mostly cloudy, high of 55.

Piedmont

“February is for the Birds” really is the name of a program, not commentary on current meteorological events. It’s at Eno River State Park, at the Fews Ford Access, which reopened midweek, and is a great opportunity for a learning experience for your kids, who had precious few learning opportunities this week. Feed a bird, learn its name. Aw.

Logistics: Saturday, Feb. 21, 3:30 p.m., Piper Cox House, Fews Ford Access, Eno River State Park. Free, but call to register (space is limited) at 919.383.1686.

Saturday forecast: High of about 40 at 3:30, with a slight chance of rain.

Mountains

If this one isn’t canceled and you can get there, Saturday’s Winter Hike at Elk Knob State Park should be a memorable one. Currently, Elk Knob has about five inches of new snow on the ground, today’s high should hit 1, the overnight low, 8 below. Saturday, 1-3 inches of snow is expected. The road to the park is open, four-wheel drive is advised. So are “traction devices” for your feet.

The Summit Trail is largely protected by a tight northern hardwood forest, save for the exposed 5,502-foot Elk Knob summit. The trail is less than two miles long, so it’s not epic winter hiking, but a nice taste thereof.

Logistics: Saturday, Feb. 21, 1 p.m., Elk Knob State Park, Todd. More info: 828.297.7261

Saturday forecast: Temperature around 30 and snow, with accumulations up to 3 inches, at hike time.

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Those are our thoughts on the weekend. Find more options at the sources listed below.

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