We’ve always enjoyed hiking as a family and much of our focus during fall vacations in the mountains of Western North Carolina center on finding hikes that are a reasonable distance for us to do with the kids. Since Emily was out of the backpack carrier (2.5 years old), she’s been able to manage 3-4 miles of hiking on an outing, which opens a lot of doors for us along the Blue Ridge Parkway.

As I’ve read more about the Appalachian Trail over the past couple of years, I’ve become more and more interested in longer hikes. Time is a critical barrier here, as splitting the AT into quarters, and then doing each of those in two stretches, still means dedicating 12-16 days per segment for each of the eight segments. As I get closer to the point of retirement, I still have to consider that this would mean leaving Jen for a couple weeks at a time to manage everything here at the house with the kids. For her part, she’s supportive of the idea, but I just can’t get comfortable with it.

For now, I’m still learning and researching, and intend to do a few longer day hikes in April, followed by some two-day (overnight) hikes in May and June. Hopefully I can do some three- or four-day hikes in the summer, and maybe in a year or two I can start doing a couple longer segments of the Trail each year.

Some of my favorite online hiking resources can be found here.