Two-Heel Drive, a Hiking Blog

I’m turning my attention to some of the trails I’ve hiked in the last year since moving to North Carolina. The first three:

• Summit Trails at Pilot Mountain State Park. Revisits the route of my first North Carolina hike. This area’s very popular and gets quite crowded on the weekends (in good weather anyway) but it’s still a fine place to hike — well-maintained, clearly-marked trails, lots of great views, even some wildlife if you watch closely.
• Waterfall Tour of Hanging Rock State Park. The Blue Ridge Mountains are awash with waterfalls, but they’re something of a surprise this far east. Not spectacular, but pretty fine for around here.
• Blue Ridge Parkway to the Grandfather Mountain Summit. This peak most reminds me of Mission Peak in the Bay Area. When I first started hiking I knew I’d never be satisfied till I scratched the itch to hike to the top of it. Luck is much more of a factor at Grandfather Mountain: on good days you might see 100-mile views from the summit; on bad ones you might get caught in an electrical storm.

Plenty more where those came from (let’s hope anyway). I’ll post updates as I finish more.

So I’ll be in Salt Lake City all week covering the Orgy of Gear that is Outdoor Retailer Summer Market

Here’s the page at Trailspace where our coverage will be centered.

Best to tune in Wednesday to see what we saw Tuesday. Covering OR works like this: All day dashing from one manufacturer’s booth to another, then all evening dashing to craft blog posts about what we saw. The workday is approximately 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. with occasional breaks to grab a snack or gulp down a drink. A few companies are plying the masses with free beer, but given that 17,000 people are in attendance, I can’t help thinking these might be less-than-ideal conditions for experiencing the charms of a cold beer.

Just for the heck of it, here’s a picture from the plane, looking out over the Wasatch Range on the way into Salt Lake City:

Gonna be an interesting week.

I’ve added five new ones since my last update.

• Castle Rock State Park – This is the Saratoga Gap Trail route to the campground and back.
• Flag Hill Loop, Sunol Wilderness — Find out why this steep climb is actually a kid-friendly hike.
• Waterfall tour of Uvas Canyon — hey, it’s where I learned how to take those snazzy waterfall-blur pictures.
• Wonders of Wildlife at Point Lobos State Reserve – how many ways can you call a place drop-dead gorgeous?
• Top Wildlife Watching Sites in the San Francisco Bay Area — A bundle of four guides: Tomales Point, Marin Headlands, Año Nuevo and Point Lobos. UPDATE: Check out Tom Clifton’s Birder’s Guide to Point Lobos.

I’m going to start moving on to trails on this end of the country pretty soon, but I may have a few more Bay Area guides in me. I don’t feel like I know the local trails well enough to write about them for money just yet.

The arrival of the holiday weekend filled me with an unexpected urge to take a holiday from hiking. By next weekend, though, I’m reasonably confident I’ll be back to normal.

If you had any adventures, share with your friends in the comments. Links to other people’s outings are also welcome.

My amateur weather forecasting skills predicted a beautiful day in the mountains — a bit of pure luck that’ll soon be rewarded with a lightning strike when cosmic balance is restored. Timing felt right for an Epic Road Trip (why waste all this scenery trudging through a a tree tunnel?), so we packed a picnic lunch and headed for the hills.

The going was easy: we took Exit 55 from I-40 and headed south on the Blue Ridge Parkway on the northeast edge of Asheville. Because the Parkway passes through terrain with annoying habits such as dropping 50 tons of rock on on the road, sections of it are often closed for repairs. We hit one such section just south of Asheville — a detour dragging on for miles and miles through towns and pastures offering none of the hundred-mile vistas we drove a hundred miles to see.

Of course, karma always wins in the end and my grumbling was justly repaid with a turn on U.S. Highway 276, which passes within spitting distance of the gorgeous Looking Glass Falls. (more…)

In lieu of hiking, I did a whirlwind tour of Hiker Town USA, which some may recognize as the hamlet of Damascus, Va., which becomes Thu-Hiker Central every spring during Trail Days (2010 version is May 14-16).

Two national scenic trails — Appalachian and Virginia Creeper — run through the center of Damascus. While the AT is more famous, the VCT is more accessible: it’s an old railroad bed, excellent for bike rides. Shuttle services can take bikers up into the hills and they can ride back to town on a wide, well-graded path.

The AT is another matter: the trail dives down into Damascus and climbs sharply up out of it.
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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.

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.

The blizzard that buried the Northeast this weekend left a mere 4 or 5 inches of wet, sticky snow in our neck of the woods. Sunday was bright, sunny and seasonable, with only one hitch: the blizzard socked in all the nearby state parks where I was thinking of going hiking.

Here’s a shot of the peak at Hanging Rock State Park, just up the road from Winston-Salem. The roads were passable in the daytime; things get interesting overnight, when all the snowmelt in the roads freezes.

Ice is the bane of Triad travelers all winter (which, thankfully, is pretty much tapped out by the end of February). It’s what forces parks people to close up shop on days when some of us would really prefer they let us in.

I can’t see the hiking picture improving till March; I might get some trail time in, but the ice has a way of ruling the day.

Till then I’ll have to find other stuff to blog about. Heck, if you’ve put up with me thus far, you might as well stop in now and again.

I’ve just returned from a four-day trip to visit family back in Illinois, where I hadn’t put in a holiday showing in 10 years. Two 13-hour drives in four days is some fun, I’m here to tell you. At least I got to pass through some mountains, albeit at 30 times my typical hiking speed.

I’m not entertaining any excuses this coming weekend; as long as we don’t have an ice storm (the bane of winter travelers in the Carolinas), I plan to get some dirt-walking in.

The nice thing about arriving to 14-degree temperatures up north is that our days in the upper 30s and lower 40s seem positively balmy in comparison.