The weekend after Mother’s Day is Trail Days 2007 in Damascus, Virginia. I’ve made up my mind I’m going. Rick of Best Hikes has the dates — May 18, 19, 20 — penciled it in, and Cutter says he can help with the planning. I liked the idea of doing this even before I learned the following about Damascus:

Damascus, Virginia, is a small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and is the gateway to the Mount Rogers National Recreation Area. It is traversed by the Appalachian Trail, the Virginia Creeper Trail, the Trans-America National Bicycle Trail, the Iron Mountain Trail, the Daniel Boone Trail, the Crooked Road Musical Heritage Trail, Virginia’s Birding and Wildlife Trail, and lies within a short distance of hundreds of miles of other hiking, horse, and biking trails.

Now that, ladies and germs, is a lot of trails.

The primary caveat of Trail Days is that’s Hiker-Palooza, with more stinky bearded white guys than you can shake a Leki at. It draws crowds in the 10,000-20,000 range into a town with a population of less than 1,000. It won’t be pristine solitude; it’ll be a big, noisy ol’ party. Which is all the more reason to go.

Most blogger meet-ups entail a bunch of geeks getting together for for a few hours of beer, cheeseburgers and lamenting their negligible readership. What we just pulled off with Ho Down No. 1 — a three-day campout five hours from the nearest metro area on six weeks’ notice — showed me that outdoor bloggers have no qualms about kicking it up a notch.

Next time we’ll have seven months to get the word out and help people make up their minds to come along. With all those trails, biking and running bloggers have a reason to join the festivities. Ho Down No. 2 sounds like a can’t-miss meet-up.