Two-Heel Drive, a Hiking Blog

The mud’s deep enough to bury a Buick around here, so I decided it was as a good a day as any to stroll the length of the Salem Creek Trail, a four-mile greenway that starts at a shopping center on the west side of Winston Salem and ends on the east side at Salem Lake. The trail has a lot going for it: almost entirely paved, passing through at least one construction zone, prone to flooding after strong rains, and home to a long line of utility towers.

OK, so I was being sarcastic there. Like San Jose’s Guadalupe River Trail — strategically situated beneath a busy airport’s final approach — this greenway is only here because there was no profitable way to develop the land it passes through. Power companies presumably acquired right-of-way for transmission towers along Salem Creek because it was a permanent geographical feature: not going anywhere, and not likely to be molested by marauding developers. The power towers are the scourge of the trail, I’ll admit, but there’d be no trail without ‘em, I suspect.

Such is life: so much compromise, so little free beer.

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Gambolin’ Man sent me an e-mail asking if I’d ever seen a movie set in Winston-Salem called “Goodbye Solo.” Turns out I’m such a movie geek that I had in fact seen it: the story goes like this: African cab driver meets bitter old white guy who offers to pay him $1,000 to take him to Blowing Rock in the Blue Ridge Mountains. One way. Solo is the name of the cabbie; William is his fare. Solo is convinced William plans to take one last leap off Blowing Rock, and the movie chronicles Solo’s quest to save William from himself. It’s a touching indie drama; worth a look if you’re into that sorta thing.

So Gambolin’ Man wanted the story on Blowing Rock — so named because strange wind patterns there cause the wind to blow vertically upward; it actually send snowfall in the wrong direction. Here’s a passage from the Wikipedia entry on the nearby village of Blowing Rock:

The Blowing Rock area was once fought over by the Cherokee and Catawba Native American tribes. According to legend, two lovers – one from each tribe – were walking near the rocks when the man received a notice to report to his village and go into battle. When his lover urged him to stay with her, he became so distraught that he threw himself off the blowing rock into the gorge. The woman prayed to the Great Spirit to return her lover, and the Spirit complied by sending a gust of wind which blew the man back up the cliff and landed him safely on the blowing rock itself.

This Widipedia entry describes the rock feature itself and includes a picture.

GPS coordinates are N36.117008, W81.660776. Here’s a Google map.

View Blowing Rock, North Carolina in a larger map

Sooner or later I’ll have to stop in on Blowing Rock. The storied Glen Burney Trail starts in the town of Blowing Rock, so it might be worth a visit.

We’ve had two blizzards this year, the most recent arriving last weekend. Each produced a blanket of snow no more than 6 inches deep, which sounds like a pittance to those in colder latitudes but is plenty enough to paralyze travel in the north-central region of North Carolina.

Deciding to travel in this kind of weather poses an ethical dilemma — as much as I’d love to be the first one digging my car out of the lot and heading out to document the winter wonders, our region isn’t really equipped to handle a lot of traffic when the weather gets icy and the roads get slippery. “Don’t travel if you don’t have to” is the mantra from The Authorities, which also provides a convenient excuse to stay indoors.

My resolve to do my civic duty and stay indoors lasted through last weekend, when I simply could no longer bear the idea of staying inside when everything outside was coated in snow. I ventured as far as Salem Lake Park, which was suitably frosted for the occasion. A couple snapshots:

Snow lines the trees and shore alike.

Shoreline reflections.

Anyway, I had to demonstrate that I haven’t been completely shirking my responsibility to venture outdoors and report back here. Tomorrow’s moral quandary: it’ll be sunny and pleasant, but the trails will be muddy as all get-out from the melting snow. Hmm.

Nobody asked me to document the Sauratown Trail, and I’m sure the last stragglers among my Bay Area readers wish I would move on to sexier terrain, but I feel like this stretch of dirt deserves bloggage. The trail itself is so-so, but the effort that went into getting it built is something else. As I mentioned last time, local hikers and horse riders just made up their mind to do it, then did it.

I doubt these posts will inspire any decisions to explore the Sauratown Trail or die trying. Then again, maybe a few will stop by and think “hey, they built their own trail, why can’t we?” That’d be cool with me.

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So I spent last Wednesday through Sunday at the Outdoor Retailer Winter Market 2010 trade show. There’s really only one reason for Winter Market: for buyers at retail outlets to decide what to put on their shelves next fall. If they make the right calls, they have a happy Christmas (wrong calls could put them out of business). The show’s planners also allow “working media” to cover the show in the hope of generating buzz/hype/interest for new products. Working media are hopelessly addicted to novelty, so it works for everybody (except the lowly gear buyer, who has to wait six months for this cool stuff to start showing up in stores).

I was there at the behest of Trailspace.com, which paid for my flights, meals and motel room, so everything I experienced there is their property and I’m obliged to devote my OR-related energies to content for our site, whose readers might actually click on a few links and buy some stuff that pays our salaries.

However, I’m totally free to flog the content we produced last week. Alicia (my boss) and I devoted five consecutive 18-hour days to Winter Market. Bill Straka, one of our fans, devoted almost that much time totally on his own; he picked up some free gear that he will happily run through the wringer (Bill’s hiked on every continent, as near as I can tell, and he’s also an accomplished climber in addition to being a retired astronomer.)

This page on our site has links to all we’ve posted to date (and there’s more to come as we post some wrap-ups). These are my posts:

• Klymit NobleTek: Company producing insulating layers via thin web of “noble gas” bubbles. Note the second guy in the video bears an uncanny resemblance to a young Keanu Reeves.
• Snowshoe trends: Slow economy and attention from outdoor athletes is driving snowshoe sales.
• Coghlan’s and Industrial Revolution: Cool gadgets that don’t cost much.
• Ready for their close-ups: Just a bunch of pictures from the first day of the show.
• Snowshoes in action: They turned me loose with their brand new shoes. Fools.
• Snowshoe preview: What’s in the pipeline for winter 2010/11.
• Nite Ize KnotBones: Video shoes an adjustable bungee cord system that caught my eye.
• Yet more pictures: Best I could do indoors with a cheap digi-cam.

We’ll have several more posts as we try to make sense of what happened last week. Then we get to start gearing up for Summer Market ‘10, which is even more fun because it’s about doing stuff during the fun seasons when bone-chilling cold is out of the picture.

This is a little known masterpiece directed by Akira Kurosawa, who made so many it’s easy to lose count. It’s about a company of Russian troops exploring the far reaches of the Siberian tundra in the part of Russia Sarah Palin can see from her back porch. One night this Chinese guy walks up to their campfire, makes himself at home and all but volunteers to join up with the Russians on their surveying mission. His name is Dersu Uzala, and he is among a vanishing breed of Siberian mountain men who live entirely in tune with their surroundings.

Here’s a video of that scene:

Dersu always knows when there’s a tiger in the neighborhood. He insists on leaving food and firewood in an old lean-to so the next travelers who find it might have something to keep them alive.

In one pivotal section of the film, he and the Russian commander get lost near nightfall on a broad expanse of tundra. He knows they have only one chance for survival: chop down as much of the tall grass around them and pile it high for insulation. Great stuff.

One of our regulars in the Trailspace Forums is a veteran backpacker who posts under the handle Tipi Walter — so called because he lived in a tipi he built himself a mile from the nearest road high in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Stories of the tipi and other accounts taken from decades of trail journals have been posted at this blog. One choice nugget from the pre-tipi years:

THE DOG
For many months I’d go to sleep there and in the middle of the night a stray black dog would curl up next to me and sleep. By morning at the crack of dawn he was gone. We were friends and we didn’t even know it. I miss that fellow.

Walter has lived our Walter Mitty fantasies of chucking all the crap and heading to the woods. He’s also gone on more than a hundred multi-night outings dutifully recorded at his TrailJournals account. One day on the Benton MacKaye Trail with his girlfriend, trailname Little Mitten:

Finally after miles the trail left the creek and became a real trail and then it was hard hiking on rocks, rocks everywhere. This part was in many ways the hardest part, trying to make time but all body parts screaming, knees bleeding and calves knotted up, arms tired and the back burning.

Mitten stumbles and falls, cheeks turn red and burning, eyes bulging out and lips seething, shouts floating on the wind going nowhere. Her walking stick is flailed against rock, a broken wish to destroy all things natural and yet she goes on, biting the bullet. We go down on the right side of the creek and there are a thousand rocks to step over. I move fast because I want to camp, to simply hear the big creek and cook and camp.

We slow down and trip, I in my own way am in ecstacy. Backpackers of all people will understand. As we continue down I am looking for an old car engine block sitting in the middle of the trail, I know once I find it we are getting closer. I see it and sit down to rest, Mitten is far back and seeing red. All is well in the Citico Wilderness.

Walter’s last wild outing concluded around New Year’s, a 15-night outing characterized by ruinous cold and tent-bending snow.
Now that’s hiking, folks.

Another one finds Carolina…

I happened upon another recent addition to North Carolina’ hiking-blogging roster, one Jenny Bennett, who moved to the mountain town of Brevard in the fall of 2009. No telling what you’ll find here (Jenny’s also an authority on the Boer War), but chances are it’ll always be worth a look.

It’s late in the year for best of last year, but it’s rainy here today and I didn’t feel like mucking up already-soft trails and coming home all gunky. Furthermore, I’m going to be off in gearland through the end of next weekend, so I wanted to have at least something on the blog this weekend, as it’s likely next weekend’ll be a bust.

The year started out in most of my usual Bay Area haunts, and ended exploring entirely new trails in the Triad region of North Carolina (also known as Tobacco and Underwear Central). What I recall from my smoking days: Winston was the rough, manly smoke while Salem was the girly menthol. We landed about three miles from the Hanes Mall. But I digress (like that’s a surprise).

The pics:

Coast daisy at Montara Mountain/McNee Ranch State Park, March 29. Write-up here

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The other day I was over in Greensboro and stopped in on the local REI and had an amazing realization: the store is my job come to life.

I’ve studiously avoided boring folks with the details of my new gig (I’m too busy boring you on the details of my hikes), but suffice to say it entails devoting intense attention to two-dimensional depictions of coats, tents, sleeping bags, shoes, socks and just about anything else that might prove useful in the wilderness.

Going to the REI and seeing all those virtual products on real hangers suddenly made me feel like the Hiking Guide I Could Never Be (unless I’m guiding over-80 hip-replacement patients, the only hikers on earth slower than I am). I couldn’t name you three indigenous species the American Southeast, but I’ve seen every fleece jacket Patagonia sells, every spring-loaded cam Black Diamond sells, every dry bag Sea-to-Summit sells. I can walk down any aisle and find something to say about something or other (and find time to remark on how small REI’s brick-and-mortar inventory is compared to what’s available out there).

Next week I’m going to Outdoor Retailer Winter Market in Salt Lake City, where something like 150 brands and 13,000 people are gathering to bask in the glory of gear. Skis and snowboards will get most of the love; we’re mainly interested in socks, snowshoes and base layers (and the free beer, of course). There’s an “all mountain demo” where we get to see skiers and boarders do cool stuff that we’d do if we didn’t have real jobs.

If you want to see what we’re up to, stop by the Trailspace Blog next Wednesday through Sunday. We’ll do what we can to make synthetic fibers seem sexy.

Good trail, great idea: Seems some local hikers and horse people decided there was no good reason not to have a trail connecting Pilot Mountain and Hanging Rock state parks, which are, after all, a mere dozen miles apart as the crow flies. So they contacted a bunch of property owners and talked ‘em into allowing a trail cutting through their lands.

They created the Sauratown Trails Association in 1988 and started digging. Today there’s a 22-mile trail connecting the two state parks; total mileage is around 35, counting the various loop trails. They’ve done an impressive job from what I’ve seen — nice grading, good signage, enough blazes to keep you on your way, a trail map and guide for each of the trail’s 16 sections.

I’ll grant you that a trail crossing private landowners’ pastures and timber is not exactly wilderness, and there’s not exactly a surplus of scenic splendor in the lands between the two state parks. You cross a bunch of country roads, you hear a lot of traffic near the busier routes, you could forget your camera with no regrets. The remarkable thing is that they built it anyway, a clear example of not letting a shortage of greatness get in the way of doing some good.
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