The great thing about hiking is how it engages almost all the senses: visual, aural, olfactory and touch. All of them are activated.
This reporter’s experience is pretty typical. My favorite trail is nearby, the usually placid, sometime precipitous, Pinhoti Trail. One of its trailheads is in Alabama’s Cheaha State Park. The Pinhoti itself is a 107-mile affair, one that eventually hooks up with the Appalachian Trail.
The path is strewn with pine velvet, and the scent – especially after a rain – is clean, green and glorious. Pine and native hardwoods tower above the Pinhote, providing ample cover from summer sun. These woods can be startlingly quiet, interrupted only by the camouflaged apparition of a deer springing across the path. The Pinhote is easily accessible from Atlanta, just 90 miles to the east. It’s also one of the least-crowded, most under-appreciated hiking trails in the continental United States.
Up the eastern spine of the country, north by northeast, lie the Hudson Highlands, an area dominated by majestic Storm King Mountain. Storm King is virtually just across the river from the home of a close friend, its summit sometimes shrouded in mist and myth. Storm King Adventure Tours offers slew of hiking tours of the area. One of them concentrates on the history of the peak itself, from the time the Dutch “discovered” it to present day. The area is about an hour and fifteen minutes north of New York City by train from Grand Central – near but in terms of mindset a world apart.
Some third of a world away from Storm King, west as the Boeing flies, is the island of Kauai. It just may be the most photographed island on earth, the place they shot, among other films, Jurassic Park. The Na Pali Coast State Wilderness Park is trailhead for the fabled Kalalau Trail. Na Pali Coast is a place of elementally rugged grandeur where deep, narrow valleys terminate abruptly at the sea. It may be, as some contend, the closest you can get to heaven here on earth. But it can also be dangerous. Watch for falling rocks and flash floods. The cliffs themselves are nothing to trifle with. You’re going to want to prepare especially carefully before embarking on the Kalalau. It’s for serious hikers, not folks in flip-flops.
(Image: lululemon athletica)
