On this, the shortest weekend day of the year, we set out at just after noon from the snowy Dragon's Tooth Parking Lot, about which The Greatest Day Hiker Of Then All had also been a better predictor than I, as her bet was there'd be three cars in th...

The first of the three major chocolate seasons is over – or the third, I guess, depending on how you measure your year in chocolate, but I prefer to think of Christmas and its accompanying delicacies as just the beginning: hot cocoa, the Lindt chocol...

I'm not sure we'd ever walked this gentle old favorite clockwise, and so on this day we set off to the right and down toward the little stretch on Va. 672 before the loop stays mostly woodsy the rest of the way.

With snow on the ground, the Blue Ridge Parkway closed and worries about the cold, we bundled up good and set out from the house on this blustery day, headed out of our neighborhood, onto the largely empty Roanoke River Greenway and then into an also-p...