The weekend hikers: Gail and Kurt Rheinheimer stand on top of Rice Fields, a bald southwest of Blacksburg, Va. along the Appalachian Trail. They were photographed in May by a couple who were thru-hiking the AT with their two children.

Week 92: 11/12/05. You look at those cool National Geographic trail maps long enough and you'll find something you haven't done that's pretty close to home and pretty cool to walk. We'd done all of the North Mountain Trail--along the next ridge west from the route of the Appalachian Trail between Dragon's Tooth and Tinker Cliffs--but had never paid any attention to the little set of trails that takes off from the northern end of the North Mountain Trail. There's a dip here, at Stone Coal Gap, where FR
183 meets the end of the North Mountain Trail and the start of the Lick Branch Trail.

It's not a big hike, the Lick Branch, but it is a rewarding one on a short, pretty, late-fall afternoon when you want to be sure to be out of the woods before dusk since you forgot your blaze orange stuff and it's muzzleloader week or something. The climb from the forest road is gentle but steady, until you're on the ridge of Broad Run Mountain, only to descend back along and across (dry) Lick Branch, where we'd hoped to decide to take either the Lick Branch Trail or the Ferrier Trail to make a loop hike (by coming back via the other one).

Alas, the hour was too late for a 10-mile trek and so we chose the climb up Lick Mountain, along a pleasant, well-blazed and hunter-free trail to a perfect knob with a perfect picnic spot that looked westward across the valley to Little Mountain, with a peek of the town of New Castle to the south in the valley floor. Once again--here in mid-November--the weather was perfect for lunch. This may well have been the last hike this year where The Greatest Day Hiker Of Them All won't have to worry about keeping her hands warm, about changing shirts at lunch, about just the right layers and whether or not to put the mittens on top of the gloves; but this day in mid-November provided a delicious reminder of why it is we put on the little packs, study the maps and set out into the woods to come across nothing but the crunch of leaves, the occasional deer, the views from the ridge and the company of no one but each other.

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