Summit Push

Cold Mountain, NC

A few weeks back, I took a trip to do some hiking on Cold Mountain, in North Carolina.  The goal for the trip was to get in some training with heavy packs and elevation gain, and hopefully a little practice with our cold weather camping systems.  It was a great trip, with some amazing views, and plenty of hard work.  It even got pretty cold the second night.  The highlight was probably waking up the morning of the second day and finding that we were above the clouds.

If you want all the details, you can read my full Trip Report on SummitPost.
My pictures from the trip can be found here.
Mark posted his pictures here.
Also ran into another Flickr user while up on top of Cold Mountain, who had a much nicer camera, you can see his pictures from the weekend here.

Welcoming Winter

As a fairly recent transplant to the South, I'm still adjusting to the lack of a winter.  One way to ease the withdrawal is to drive the 4 hours from Charleston up to the mountains of North Carolina.  This weekend some friends and I took a trip up to the Shining Rock Wilderness.  The idea behind the trip was that we were going to get a great view of the Leonid Meteor Shower.  Of course, that meant it was overcast most of the trip, but it still was a great time, and we got something we didn't expect to see quite this early in the year:  SNOW!

Overall it was a fairly low key trip, but it was a great warmup trip for some further winter hiking ambitions we have.  The hike out in the morning was absolutely beautiful.  The wind blew pretty hard all night, and made for some interesting snow coverage patterns.  No meteors, but I didn't hear any complaints.

My pictures are up on Flickr, and if you want more pictures, Mark also posted his.