Two-Heel Drive, a Hiking Blog

Three weeks of gross lassitude and all-around laziness ended Sunday with a seven-mile hike at Pilot Mountain State Park (site of my first-ever North Carolina hike.)

Pilot Mountain two days after the Blizzard of ‘09 blew through. Most of the snow’s gone now.

I was so out of shape that I skipped Pilot Mountain’s main attraction — the Big Pinnacle, which from a distance looks uncannily similar to a Big Nipple — and concentrated on a moderate loop along the Grassy Ridge Trail, Mountain Trail and Grindstone Trail.

It’s mostly standard walking-in-the-woods fare without much eye candy, but when I’ve sat on my fanny for most of a month, my cranky bones need a gentle reintroduction. Hiking to be hiking, for sure, but hey, they’re my feet. I’ll punish ‘em as I choose.
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Pilot Mountain is the real name that inspired the town next door on The Andy Griffith Show (Andy’s hometown is Mount Airy, which got Hollywoodized to “Mayberry”; presumably Andy approved it to protect the identities of Otis the Town Drunk and Earnest T. Bass, the stone-throwing lunatic). Remember how somebody was always heading over to Mount Pilot?

There is a little town called Pilot Mountain, right at the foot of the peak of the same name, which looks conspicuously like the place where Zeus might have been weaned. The nipple is actually called the Big Pinnacle, which rises to over 2400 feet, a tall peak indeed for these parts. (The Appalachian Mountains start rising in earnest about 100 miles west of here).

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