We’ve received reports of late that the American Tobacco Trail from Massey Chapel Road in Durham south to New Hill was passable. Not “open,” mind you, but “passable.” Based on a scouting trip this morning, it’s true — if you can bunnyhop moving bulldozers.

Thursday commences a month-long celebration of our statewide trail-in-progress, the Mountains-to-Sea Trail. To find out what all is planned for the tribute, TIONC caught up this morning with Friends of the MST Executive Director Kate Dixon. We’ll share what all is going on with Mountains-to-Sea Trail Month as October unfolds, but thought we’d go ahead and share our conversation about the MST through the Triangle, which was especially encouraging.

“Excuse me,” the woman ... well, she didn’t exactly yell because she didn’t want to excite the snake, which was what she was about to alert us to: A three-foot brown snake that in the last five minutes had stretched itself across the boardwalk. The woman and her boyfriend were headed to our perch, a secluded deck off the half-mile boardwalk at the Walter B. Jones Center for the Sounds in Columbia. Not any more.

The best way to ensure privacy on the trail? Hire a guard snake.

Last week, we touched on why fall — with its cooling temperatures and changing colors — is a good time to launch a hiking program. Here’s more incentive: Snakes are on the move.

Cashiers

After a shaky start, the fall 2009 hiking season hit full stride today in the North Carolina mountains. Yesterday, the first official day of fall, saw the region continue to bail from several days of heavy rain. Flash flood warnings were in effect for much of the mountains as well as something I'd never seen before: landslide alerts. Not what you want to hear when your agenda includes the Black Mountains and Linville Gorge, two exceptionally precipitous areas along the northern Blue Ridge escarpment.

First, my apologies for what, over the past few days, may have appeared to be a wild (really wild) swing in direction for TakeItOutSideNC.com. The site was hacked by someone with a warped sense of adventure and while it may have seemed that I was slow to address the problem, I was backpacking and had to rely on my own IT girl to remedy the first wave of hacking and babysit the site until I could get back and look under the hood. (Like I know what I’m doing; I still look for the carriage return lever when I start a new paragraph.)