Jessie Johnson - North Carolina Adventure Weekends: A Traveler’s Guide to the Best Outdoor Getaways

PREFACE

Where are you guys going this weekend?

Pilot Mountain

We had been leaving town so many weekends, our coworkers eventually stopped asking if we were going anywhere and instead started asking where we were going. We realized we had become pretty predictable when they could answer for us: North Carolina!

Both of us spent a lot of time in North Carolina as children. Matt started hiking in the Western North Carolina mountains when he was 6 months old, and Jessie spent much of her childhood romping in the woods behind her Broadway, North Carolina, home. When we moved to northern Georgia, we were excited to live only a few hours away from North Carolina; in fact, the drive was short enough to take on a Friday night after work! Every weekend of camping in the wilds of North Carolina left us craving even more adventure in our new home away from home.

Finding the best places to get our outdoor adventure fix every weekend began consuming a lot of our time. We were always on the hunt for places to fit in as many of our favorite activitiescamping, biking, hiking, paddling, climbing, and, okay, beer-tastingas possible, with as little driving in between adventures as possible. We came to realize that we werent alone. Most of the outdoors lovers we knew craved spending more of their free time playing outside but couldnt find the time to plan weekend trips during their busy weeks. To solve this problem, we decided to put our years of weekend adventures to good use and this book was born.

Trail to the Narrows

North Carolina offers adventures from the mountains to the sea. In fact, the Mountains-to-Sea Trail (MST) runs across the entire expanse of the stateand threads its way through several of our chapters. Indeed, this state is as ripe with weekend trip possibilities as your hiking clothes in mid-July. North Carolina Adventure Weekends puts outdoor adventure game plans at your fingertips, making it easy to pack the car and hit the road. As we researched this book, we discovered even more North Carolina locales that seemed to be made for a weekends worth of adventures. A day trip paddling down the Green River turned into two days of camping in the deep and mysterious Green River Gorge and hiking to waterfalls straight from our tent. When we camped at Carolina Beach State Park, we had planned a weekend of paddling, paddling, and oh, more paddling, but the opportunities we found to explore the terra firma on foot and bike were too irresistible to pass up. Weve been asked more than a few times, Whats in the middle of North Carolina, anyway? We respond, with no hesitation: LOTS! Youll find national forests, nature preserves, rivers, and even elevation changes. On a recent trip to Raleigh, we found more lakes, rivers, hiking, and mountain biking trails crisscrossing the states capital city than we could ever conquer in just a few days.

White Oak River

While we cant pack the car for you, we hope this book, with its ready-to-go plans, inspires you to spend your weekends doing whatever it is that makes you happy: cooking over a glowing campfire, gripping cool rock as you scale a cliff, hiking to mountaintop vistas, carving through dirt trails on two wheels, exploring streams, marshes, and ocean, or just relaxing in a hammock as you breathe in fresh air.

This is what makes us happy. So if you see us out there, say hi!

Blue Clay Bike Park