Mountains-To-Sea Trail

Directly behind the house leads into the Mountains-To-Sea trail. For those who don't know much about the Mountains-to-Sea trail, it's a very long trail as implied by the name. It has a lot of trailheads scattered all over North Carolina. It spans 1,200 miles across North Carolina from Clingmans Dome in the Great Smoky Mountains to Jockey’s Ridge on the Outer Banks. If you were to hike it to completion, the average completion time is 70 days (includes your rest days). The average takes into account people who may be biking parts of it, and those who may also be combining time canoeing within rivers like the Neuse. Personally, this sort of long hike is really appealing to me and I am very interested to hopefully hike the Mountains-To-Sea trail. Of course, this would take some substantial training, planning and being not at a job for like two months, but I think it's totally doable. Anyway, for our hike today, we did roughly 3.5 miles and it was pretty much all uphill for the first 2 miles. It had been relatively cool when we were still at the house, but the longer we hiked, the more the humidity showed up. It was pretty surprising to find moderate humidity in the mountains in April. I am proud that we went to the highest point in the current trail segment, but I can also say that we both had a bad case of North Carolina swamp butt upon return. We did see some interesting plant life, and somehow had enough reception to identify it in my plant app. The super leafy green depicted below in the swampy area is called "Skunk Cabbage"! It's edible when you boil the leaves and stems and has other medicinal uses. The reason it's called "skunk" is because when it flowers and produces a berry like fruit - the fruit is incredibly odorous in a bad way. So, the name is pretty accurate. We only saw it in one place along the trail and it was the swampy / wet land.