WNCOutdoors.info Blog

Come enjoy the great outdoors with SAFC by joining our hemlock surveyors on a moderate hike in one of the Pisgah National Forest’s prime eastern hemlock communities! We’ll amble through the hemlock groves at the Pisgah Center for Wildlife Education and along the Cat Gap Loop trail towards the Cedar Rock Falls area, while discussing the condition of the hemlocks in this region and the pest responsible for widespread hemlock decline. Participants will have the opportunity to learn more about the hemlock conservation initiative within the Pisgah National Forest, SAFC’s partnership with the USDA Forest Service, and techniques for assessing hemlock health and levels of stand infestation. This hike traverses less than 2 miles, roundtrip.

For more information, check out this Events page on SAFC’s web site.

Our latest “Field Research” is up on Breadcrumbs: check out Grandfather Mountain State Park’s Profile trail. The trail is beautiful this time of year, and would make a good, cool summer hike too (on a clear day) thanks to its elevation. You can view the details and download the track on its Breadcrumbs page.

One thing that surprised me about this trail? There’s actually a (very) small waterfall near the beginning of the trail, as it crosses Shanty Branch. This isn’t mentioned on any of the trail descriptions I’ve seen, but I think it’s pretty, and photogenic!

As always, this is just a preliminary map and we’ll be vetting this information more before putting it up on the sites (as we plan on doing for all of Grandfather Mountains State Park). Enjoy!

Although we don’t yet have adequate coverage of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to add it to the sites, it remains one of the most popular spots for hiking in Western NC so we thought this would be worth mentioning. An EF4 tornado touched down on the Tennessee side of the park during the huge tornado outbreak on April 27, ripping down thousands of trees. The park service has closed 7 trails, and more may be closed as cleanup efforts continue. More information, including a list of affected trails, can be found on the National Park Service’s web site (and there’s also a a stunning picture of a mountainside stripped bare of trees):
http://www.nps.gov/grsm/parknews/tornado-closure.htm

Beech Mountain officially opened its Emerald Outback Trail Park, adding 8 miles of hiking and mountain biking trails to the inventory in WNC!  This is Phase 1 of what will be the larger Beech Mountain Trail Park. The trails are open to the public 7 days a week and parking is available at the trailhead. We hope to have more detailed information about the trails posted on the web sites soon; for now, here’s a story about the opening from The Mountain Times:
http://www2.mountaintimes.com/watauga_weekly/Adventure_Park_opens_Emerald_Outback_Trails_id_003449

And here’s a link to the official web site for Beech Recreation, which includes more information about the trails including a map and video:
http://www.beechrecreation.org/

The N.C. Division of Forest Resources lists the following trails as temporarily closed in Dupont State Forest:

• Bridal Overlook Trail
• Hill Top Loop
• Cascade Trial
• Galax Trail

And these appear to be permanently closed:

• Grassy Dam Trail
• Laurel Trail
• Little Briery Trail
• URC Trail
• Vista Trail

The Galax trail closure is a bit concerning, since it’s the only direct way to get from the Hooker Falls area up to Triple & High Falls on a bike. There are some longer, roundabout ways, one of which involves a busy highway. And it’s also sad, since it was closed due to massive erosion taking place along the path. This trail was touted as one of Dupont’s first “sustainable” trail projects back when the waterfalls area was acquired, but it didn’t wear well – horse hooves just tore it to pieces. Hopefully, it can be either re-routed or armored to stand up to the traffic that it gets when open.

The others are mostly short, boring, overgrown, and/or dead-end trails that will have no impact to recreation. In fact, the one time I tried to hike the Grassy Dam trial, I lost it after about 100 yards and struck out through the woods instead.

We just released a big software update to HikeWNC.info and MTBikeWNC.com. Although you won’t notice much difference at first (aside from a few new bugs we’ve inevitably created), lots of things have changed in the background, especially with the way we create the Google maps. This should allow us to put more stuff on the maps and display maps in more places, as well as geotagging just about everything on the site.

And this also means that with the maps project winding down, we’ll have more time to fix odd little bugs here and there and add some features and new information that people have been asking for. I’ve been several new places that I haven’t had time to even put on the site yet – those should start appearing soon. And hopefully we can work in some visual and navigation updates to make finding the information easier than ever!

The Jackrabbit Mountain trail system, located just outside of Hayesville in Clay County on the shores of Chatuge Lake, officially opens on Saturday, April 30th. The trail system offers 14.5 miles of hiking and mountain biking trails, and trailhead facilities were recently finished to complete the visitor experience. It’s been under construction for over 5 years now. Festivities begin at 10:00 AM and include speeches, a ribbon cutting ceremony, music, food, group rides, hikes, and trail running. The weather is forecast to be beautiful, lower 80′s and sunny, and it sounds like a great time to celebrate some new trails, so come on out and enjoy the weekend!

Get more information on this Forest Service news & events page.

Join the Southern Appalachian Forest Coalition’s Hemlock survey team for a field trip to Curtis Creek, where we will have the opportunity to learn a simple technique for assessing the condition of hemlock trees.  Although many hemlocks in our National Forests have already died from the invasive Hemlock Wooly Adelgid, surveys are being done in hemlock stands in order to find remaining healthy trees and determine which areas would still benefit from treatment.  This field trip will provide participants an opportunity to compare Hemlock stands that have been chemically treated to other stands that are in various stages of  die back due to the Adelgid infestation. Other topics of discussion will include methods the Forest Service is using to save the hemlocks. The field trip includes a 2-mile roundtrip hike to a scenic waterfall. Bring a bag lunch.

Date: Sat. April 2, 2011
Meeting Time:  9:30AM
Meeting Place:  Ingles Market, Swannanoa.  Located off I-40 at exit 59 on Rt 70.  Meet by the gas station in the Ingles parking lot to carpool or meet at 10:30AM at the Curtis Creek campground outside of Old Fort.
Contact: Ed Mayer  e-mail:  ednsue74@earthlink.net, phone: 828-505-1080

Please  call  by Thursday, March 31  to let us know if you plan to attend

Directions to Curtis Creek: From Old Fort, NC, take Hwy 70 East 2 miles to campground sign (Curtis Creek Rd./SR 1227) Turn left onto Curtis Creek Rd. and go 4.7 miles to the campground.

Edit: here is a link to the event on SAFC’s web site!

Pisgah Area SORBA will be hosting a trail workday at Dupont State Forest tomorrow, Sunday, March 6. Meeting place is at the old Buck Forest parking area (now called High/Triple Falls parking area) at 9am. Work will be clearing for a new trail corridor, which will result in about 1 mile of new trail when completed! You can get more information on Pisgah Area SORBA’s website.

I’m testing out a neat new web-based mapping tool called Breadcrumbs. I’ll be adding my raw GPS data from my hikes and rides (field research!) there. You’ll see maps of the trips and be able to download the raw track data from those posts. Once it’s corrected, referenced, and edited, I’ll put it in the regular trail database on HikeWNC and MTB WNC as usual, but this should allow a way to get the raw trail map data out there as quickly as possible. As a bonus, it gives me another place to backup the map data I’ve collected!

You can check out the lsit of my latest additions on my Breadcrumb user page. I’ll start with older trips and add new ones as I do them. As always, you can also keep checking this blog, our Facebook page, and Twitter for the latest updates. We hope you enjoy!

For the geeks out there, I found this app in the Google Chrome Web Store. It’s a fantastic example of what can be done with open-source software, including the Chrome browser, the ExtJS and Prototype javascript libraries. We need more apps like this to make a web-based operating system (a la Google’s new Chrome OS) possible!