GetHiking! Winter Wild Off-Trail Adventure: Hanging Rock State Park

Winter is the honest season. Stripped bare of busy ground cover, an obscuring understory and a thick canopy, winter is incapable of keeping a secret. Stone foundations from homesteads long abandoned lie exposed. Distant mountain peaks are revealed. Critters have nowhere to hide. It’s the perfect time to be in the woods.

Especially if you head off the beaten path.

That's the aim of our new Winter Wild hike series. We'll take you to five places you may well have hiked, but explore portions of them where we're pretty sure you haven't set foot. In most cases, we'll start out on trail, but we won't stay there for long. We'll spend most of each hike using abandoned roadbeds and game paths to discover the hidden secrets exposed by winter.

On Jan. 26 we'll hike at Hanging Rock State Park north of the Triad. We'll start with the familiar, the mile-long climb up to Hanging Rock. But instead of heading west to the highly popular rock outcrop, we'll hike east, then down the mountain a ways to the remains of a plane that crashed in 1963. It's a rarely visited portion of the park that exhibits the true wild of the relic Sauratown Mountains that the rest of the park hints at. Our hike will be 5-6 miles.

The hike is limited to 12 participants. There's a $35 fee for the hike.

Prior to the hike, you will receive an eguide for the hike covering where we plan to explore and what we're looking to find. We'll include a little history to put our trip in perspective. You'll also receive a custom map of the hike, identifying where we'll be hiking and what we'll be looking for.

Map and compass skills are recommended but not required. (If you're interested in obtaining said skills, check out our our GetOriented! Finding Your Way in the Woods course, which teaches basic map and compass skills, then takes you down the trail, and off, to test those newfound skills.)

Remaining hikes in the Winter Wild series are:

• Uwharrie National Forest, Asheboro. Saturday, Feb. 16, 10 a.m. Objective: Birkhead Wilderness. 7-9 miles
• Raven Rock State Park, Lillington. Saturday, March 2, 10 a.m. Objective: The North Side of the River. 8 miles