2012

This great walk seems to come up for us around New Year's and on July 4, which got me to wondering how many times, since Valentine's Day 2004 when we began the hiking oddity, we've done it.

We set out at just after noon from the snowy Dragon's Tooth Parking Lot, about which The Greatest Day Hiker Of Them All had also been a better predictor than I, as her bet was there'd be three cars in the lot and mine was six. There were two.

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 downtown.