Recreation

A new, 4-mile extension of the Uwharrie National Recreation Trail, along with a new trailhead, will be dedicated Dec. 8. The trailhead will be named in honor of Joe Moffitt, the founder and visionary behind the creation of the trail.

The South Yadkin River, only ten minutes from Salisbury, has several interesting stretches. Recently, The LandTrust for Central North Carolina hosted a kayak trip there. Our trip began at the launch site on U.S. Highway 601 South and ended at a public access area at the end of Hannah Ferry Road. Both of these locations […]

What kinds of wild animals are in the woods, and what are they up to? The Smithsonian Institution and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences have set up cameras to find out. Scroll below for a photo gallery of animal images captured as part of the eMammal project. This summer, as part of my […]

Thru-hiking means going the complete distance (end-to-end) on a long-distance trail. Thanks to the efforts of several organizations, all 40 miles of the Uwharrie Trail can now be “thru-hiked.” Often we hike trails and visit parks and don’t think much about how they came about for us to enjoy. The Uwharrie Trail was originally built […]

If I didn’t have natural places to visit – trails to hike, rivers to kayak, mountains to climb, the sound of total quiet deep in the woods and of running brooks and streams – my life would be far less full. Famous naturalist John Muir said, “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to […]

While cities such as Memphis have gained national attention for proclaiming a bicycle-friendly goal, Charlotte has been quietly taking a number of steps to improve its own streets for cyclists. Its bicycle sharing program, B-cycle, the first in North Carolina, has gotten a lot of publicity, but several other small scale improvements have begun, designed […]

Your average roadmap of North Carolina represents the Uwharrie National Forest as a large, green blob covering most of Montgomery County as well as portions of Randolph and Davidson. In fact, that’s simply the proclamation boundary. Look at a detailed map of the national forest, and you’ll see a crazy patchwork of light and dark […]

While walking on my grandparents’ property last week, I was fortunate to stumble upon one of the most common and understated orchids in bloom – the Crane-fly orchid (Tipularia discolor). We typically think of orchids as something rare and eye-catching, with vibrant colors that stand out vividly from a woodland backdrop. The Crane-fly orchid, however, […]

Where are you going for the 4th of July this year? Hiking the western North Carolina Mountains, where you could go for a hike up Mount Mitchell (the highest peak east of the Mississippi)? Camping in the Linville Gorge Wilderness Area of the Pisgah National Forest? You could plan on spending the day trout fishing […]

Several years ago, when we were planning to change the way we manage some of our land, I happened to meet Bob Askins, a biology professor at Connecticut College and author of Restoring North America’s Birds: Lessons from Landscape Ecology. As we discussed my projects, he encouraged me to do a baseline inventory before we […]