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As our readers weigh in with their picks in many categories, here are five personal picks for the great walks in the mountains.
Virginia’s Cold Mountain is a timelessly great walk, as witnessed by Editor Kurt Rheinheimer upon its bald around the time of the magazine’s 20th anniversary.
You get lucky enough to work on this magazine for 30 years, you also get a big incentive to get outside into these mountains. Over those years, Gail and I have made forays, from our home here in Roanoke, Virginia, to mountain places small and large, from Helvetia, West Virginia and Sneedville, Tennesee, for small examples, to “big cities” like Asheville, North Carolina and Knoxville, Tennessee.
And of course all manner of places in between, including, last summer, Franklin, North Carolina, where part of our family was among the throng that overwhelmed that little town as the total eclipse turned it dark for a few minutes, to the erupting cheeers of people all over downtown and its surroundings.
The most constant and most rewarding aspects of our 30 years of “best of the mountains” have taken place on foot.
Here, in no particular order, are 10 memorable walks worth doing again:
- Roanoke River Greenway from our house to downtown Roanoke, Virginia, and back. The rewards of this walk include not just the riverside stroll amid what in the warm months becomes hundreds of walkers, runners and bikers, but the wonderful restaurant offerings of downtown. You build in a meal to your 6 miles round-trip and you’ve built a very nice experience.
- Asheville, North Carolina’s downtown. We’ve never built a particular route or sequence in our many visits, but the gotta-includes are Lexington Avenue (great shops), the Pack Square-to-(and including) the Grove Arcade, down Biltmore Avenue at least to the Orange Peel, and, though not quite as scenic, down Clingman Avenue to the Grey Eagle, where we’ve seen the estimable Fred Eaglesmith several times.
- In the Mount Pleasant National Scenic Area of Virginia, the Old Hotel-Appalchian Trail walk over Cold Mountain, a 5.7-mile loop that offers great blackberry spots in the summer, a shelter along a stream not far from the midpoint and the mile-long 4,000-foot bald of Cold Mountain, with wide open 360-degree views.
- West Virginia’s Dolly Sods plateau. We’ve most often gone up via the Red Creek Trail, which is a rugged delight in its own right. And after that climb, you’re on the highest plateau in the East (at up to 4,700 feet), amid wonders including squishy bogs, fields full of blueberries, heath barrens and more. The loss, to logging around 1900, of the mammoth spruce and eastern hemlock forest, and subsequent use of the plateau for military purposes was mitigated by protection efforts in the 1970s, resulting in interlocking sets of trails full of discovery.
- The Georgia Appalachian Trail north from Woody Gap to Neels Gap and the Mountain Crossings store. Any walk on the A.T. when your destination is a little piece of civilization-in-the-woods is a treat. (Other favorites include the walks to Skyland and Big Meadows in Shenandoah National Park, into Damascus, Virginia and Hot Springs, North Carolina.) On this Georgia walk, you get to cross the state’s highest peak and then walk through Mountain Crossings. To come out of the forest into such a bounty of goodies in all realms of hiking is just plain lots of fun.
As are all of these, and as are hundreds of others throughout the mountains. Our goal over recent years has been to combine a stretch of forest or greenway with a nice restaurant stop. You get your steps in, and you get a date!