Now blogging from North Carolina's Triad (Greensboro/Winston-Salem/Highpoint) and hiking the trails as I find them.
All New: Map page for my North Carolina hikes
Most of the content here reflects five years worth of hikes in the San Francisco Bay Area. I've created a Guide to Bay Area Hikes for those who are looking for nice dirt paths to trod in Northern California.
Can’t imagine I’ll get any hiking done this weekend, as we’re moving to our new place.
Next weekend, though, I should be all settled in and ready get out there again.
If you need some hiking bloggage, check out Gambolin’ Man’s adventures in Southern California’s High Desert.
In other news, the new Yosemite Half Dome permit system is up and running.
So it’s back to real hiking this week: up-and-down slogs, feet slipping into creeks, sticks poking me in the face. The first three sections of the Sauratown Trail run west out of Hanging Rock State Park — notable for its 2,500-foot knobs and array of craggy rock faces — through timber, along streams, with nary a flat stretch. My GPS unit logged a generous 1,700 feet of elevation gain over 9.5 miles; I doubt it was that hilly, but this one does tiptoe into strenuous territory.
This weekend’s hike completes eight of the Sauratown Trail’s 16 sections. Sections 1-3 are clearly the best so far, with one caveat: a butt-ugly clear-cut in the middle of Section 3 (otherwise the nicest section of the eight I’ve seen). Otherwise, though, these sections have a smattering of small waterfalls and multiple chances to rock-hop across streams. Abundant forest canopy means the vistas are scant, but at least the terrain has enough variety for a decent workout.
I also found out over the weekend that the trail has a Facebook fan page, where trail volunteers have been posting updates of recent maintenance projects. Our winter from hell has been keeping them very busy. Storms wiped out a hanging bridge and left dead-falls all up and down the trail. Most have been cleared; I saw just one requiring complicated route-finding.
The gang at EveryTrail.com has a new feature for all us GPS geeks: Destinations — which gather all the EveryTrail trips for a specific geographic region into a single page.
The new stuff refines the Guides project that Trailspotting and I contributed to — it subtracts much of the effort required to write a guide, adds social-networking features, appoints “Gurus” (whoever’s visited the destination most often) and lets users appoint themselves “rangers” to watch over the destinations, which other users can edit.
Several Bay Area locales have active Destinations. A small sampling to give you an idea how it works:
I created a couple local destinations:
Just so we’re all clear: I was paid for my contributions to the Guides section, but I didn’t get a dime for my Destinations. I added a few because it was quick and easy, hallmark of a handy Web resource.
Incidentally, I learned last week that EveryTrail’s parent company scored a cool $1 million in venture capital funding back in December, a sign that people with big bucks are starting to like what they see there (which has pluses and minuses, as the recent stock market crash reminds us).
Latest example of how things around here aren’t like the Bay Area: a week with no rain will not dry up the mud situation (the Winter From Hell does seem to be on its way out of town, though). I knew there was no point driving a long way to get all gunky so I did a bit more exploring Saturday at Tanglewood Park.
I ended up in Tanglewood’s far southwest corner, which is about as close to wild as it gets in this suburban park. It even has a Genuine Southern Swamp — all it lacks is a few alligators.
Last week’s post included pix of all the major attractions; this week it’s “get some blue sky in the picture and hope for the best.” The local terrain proves what I suspected all along back in the day: in pretty scenery the pictures take themselves. When the scenery’s more scant, you have to do annoying things like wait for wildlife to so something interesting and think long and hard about how to pluck the telling detail from a tangle of brambles. Work, in other words, which I strenuously avoid on weekends.
I spent a few hours Sunday getting to know Tanglewood Park, which was the main reason we chose to buy a condo in Clemmons, a bedroom burb on Winston-Salem’s southwest edge.
We closed on the condo last week, but Melissa’s idea of move-in condition departs considerably from the sellers’ (translation: every wall needs new paint and window treatments; all rooms must be clean enough for open-heart surgery), so it’ll still be a couple more weeks till we move in. It’s true that I locked in 30-year mortgage before steeping foot in the park, but I was up for anyplace where I could take my morning walks without fighting traffic or breathing garbage truck fumes.
So about Tanglewood: The park stretches over 1,100 acres — far too many are devoted to that game best described as “the perfect way to ruin a nice walk in the country,” but it’s not all fairways and water hazards. Among its amenities: three single-track mountain biking trails; abundant stables and horse trails; lake for fishing and paddle-boating; public swimming pool; horse-racing track; campground; annual Festival of Lights holiday extravaganza; amphitheater stage for outdoor; Arboretum full of fascinating plants; circa 1859 Manor House, now a bed and breakfast.
I’d be hard pressed to believe many counties in the Carolinas have better parks than this one. It’s certainly the equal of any individual county park in the Bay Area, though every hike around here is yet more proof that most Californians have no idea how good they’ve got it, parkwise. For every nice trail around here, you guys have 12.
Sunday’s stroll came in at about 9.5 miles. I saw horses, Canada geese, a few bike riders, and a guy teaching his 4-year-old how to fish (that could’ve been a blog post all its own).
Read the rest of this entry »
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.
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.
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:
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.