hiking in the woods near nc state

Dylan and Rosie begin the trail

This past weekend I went hiking with my brother on the Falls Lake Trail/Mountains to Sea Trail. My friend Jeff Brewer is the Vice President of the Friends of the Mountains to Sea Trail, a group that helped design and build, and now helps preserve the MST. Brewer is one of a small group of people that has hiked the entire MST, which stretches from Clingman’s Dome to Jockey’s Ridge, a trail of 530 miles across the State of North Carolina. However when Jeff hiked MST, most of the trail had not been built. This meant he had to hike on roads, causeways, even interstates! In this area, most of the trail has now been completed, but there are still parts of the trail that are being constructed. Check out the FMST website for more information. Now onto my hike!

Rosie discovers Deer Scat

My brother Dylan, our chocolate lab Rosie and I picked up the trail near the Granville County/Durham county border, off of Cheek Road. The goal of this hike was to visit Dylan’s Eagle Project, which he built a bridge across a large creek on the trail. Both of us are Eagles, and both of our projects are on the MST. I built a trailhead kiosk, he built a bridge. And I’m the overachiever. Either way we headed East from Cheek road towards the Highway 50 crossing. This is an important landmark for me because my Eagle Project is off of the Highway 50 trailhead. As we walked in we ventured through some marshy areas, made so mostly by a heavy rain the week before. We could see Falls Lake for most of the hike, but we were looking in the opposite direction the majority of the time.

Our dog Rosie is a champion, earlier that morning her friend – and our cat, Betty – passed away. My mother convinced us that animals mourn too, so we assumed that she was mourning the passing of Betty. She is a champion because she has been losing a lot of weight to get to a healthy weight and this was her first hike with Dylan and me. Usually she walks with my mother and father, which is always a much slower and shorter hike than what Dylan and I were looking for. We planned to hike four miles in, because that’s where we thought Dyl’s project was. After about 3 miles, I asked Dylan, “Does any of this look familiar? Where is your project?” He stopped, looked around and decided, “I don’t think we got on the trail at the right place.” After discussing this and letting the daylight decrease, we discovered that we had picked up the trail 11 miles from Dylan’s project, instead of four. So we continued to hike a little farther to see where we could get to before it would be too dark to not turn around. This meant that Rosie would walk about 7 miles in just a few short hours, so we were very proud of her.

ROSIE HOLD STILL

We saw lots of beautiful sights along the trail, but most of these are better expressed through pictures of the area. Good luck on your next semester and as always, Go Pack!