Weekends usually put the crowd in Crowders Mountain, the state park closest to Charlotte (metro area population 1.7 million), but the trails tend to be clear on January mornings when red’s all but gone from the thermometer. I started out…
Piedmont
Hikes in the Piedmont region of North Carolina – east of the mountains, west of the coast.
First Hike of 2011: Lower Cascade Falls and Cook’s Wall
by tom • January 2, 2011 • 2 Comments
My New Year’s resolution is to hike a new trail every weekend. But coming up with a resolution was about as ambitious as I got Sunday morning, as I was satisfied with a jaunt to trusty ol’ Hanging Rock State…
First hike: Eno River State Park
by tom • November 28, 2010 • 2 Comments
We’re back to our late-November color pallet of dirt, bark and dead leaves, which, frankly, is a welcome break from Leaf Season and the one-hike-a-year crowd. Leaf Season was on my mind yesterday at Eno River State Park, which is…
Festival of Lights, minus the lights
by tom • November 21, 2010 • 0 Comments
I figured anybody could take snazzy nighttime snapshots of the Festival of Lights, which happens every holiday season at Tanglewood Park. The fest is one of the biggest light shows in the Southeast, which means the roads past our neighborhood…
History hike at Old Salem Musuems & Gardens
by tom • November 19, 2010 • 2 Comments
Consider this sequel to last year’s history hike at Bethabara Park. The first Moravian settlers in the modern-day Triad region bunked in an old trapper’s cabin at Bethabara, but their leaders back in Pennsylvania had much larger plans: a whole…
Quick pic from latest hike
by tom • November 14, 2010 • 0 Comments
I spent a few hours Sunday at Morrow Mountain State Park, about 60 miles south of the Triad. I’ve posted about all the fall-color shots I can stand, but I figured I could squeeze in one more and hopefully call…
Summer hikes at River Sections of Pilot Mountain State Park
by tom • August 22, 2010 • 4 Comments
I have as much fun finding these trails as I do hiking on them. They’re all tucked way, way back in the countryside, and while there are reasonably direct routes (like less than a half-dozen turns from a major highway),…
Dirt walking on a mountain bike path
by tom • July 27, 2010 • 4 Comments
It was so hot this past weekend I couldn’t muster the ambition for an ambitious hike; best I could do was 4.6 miles on the mountain-biking single-track at the park across the road. Tanglewood Park has a raft of amenities,…
Revisiting the peak of Pilot Mountain
by tom • July 18, 2010 • 7 Comments
I’m warming to this idea: at least one sweltering outing a year at the top of Pilot Mountain, just to test the principle that there’s no bad time to hike up there. I finished a sweat-drenched wretch on Sunday just…