This Land, Your Land

National Parks Traveler reported this week about a state grant that will go toward rehabilitating a popular trail on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

The $75,000 grant from the North Carolina Recreation Trails Program will go to the Watauga County Tourism Development Authority to fix a two-mile, badly eroded portion of the Boone Fork Trail at Julian Price Memorial Park, the report says. Boone Fork is also part of the Section 13 of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail between the Grandfather Mountain area and Blowing Rock.

With the state money and $18,750 of its own, the tourism group plans to rebuild part of the Boone Fork Trail and construct a dedicated MST trailhead parking area, an information kiosk, and 700 feet of new trail adjacent to the Tanawha Trail, another portion of MST Section 13.

The new issue of The Steward, the state parks newsletter, details the volunteer effort to construct the 1.8-mile summit trail at Elk Knob State Park near Boone.

The five-and-a-half-year project took more than 6,000 hours of labor, the article says. Most of that labor was supplied by Appalachian State University students and members of scout groups, outdoors clubs and civic organizations.

The trail, which climbs about 1,500 feet to the 5,520-foot peak, replaces "a barely navigable, steep and exhausting vehicle trail as the only route to the summit."

Elk Knob is the tallest mountain wholly in Watauga County, the article says. The park was designated a natural area in 2003 and became a state park in 2007. Since then, development has been slow, with a ranger station, picnic grounds and parking areas completed in 2008 as "interim facilities."

The November issue of The Steward also has articles about the dedication of the Neuse River Trail in Raleigh as a 6.5-mile segment of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, about Hanging Rock State Park's 75th anniversary, and the opening of an interim office for Grandfather Mountain State Park on N.C. 105 in Banner Elk.

As fans of the state's Mountains-to-Sea Trail celebrated the opening of a 6.5-mile segment in Raleigh last week, leaders of the Friends of the MST said Saturday they expect another 70 miles of trail to open by the end of 2012.

Kate Dixon and Jeff Brewer said in The News & Observer that the MST should measure about 610 miles after segments open near Boone, Pilot Mountain, Greensboro, Burlington, Hillsborough, Durham and Clayton in the next year.

The entire Mountains-to-Sea Trail is to eventually cover about 1,000 miles between Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Jockey's Ridge State Park.

The 6.5-mile Upper Neuse River Greenway Trail opened last Wednesday between the Falls Lake Dam and the WRAL soccer complex off of Perry Creek Road in North Raleigh. It is the first leg of what will eventually be a 28-mile trail along the Neuse River between Falls Lake and the Johnston County line. (Joe Miller has a nice Google mashup map of the trail at his Get Going NC blog.)

"Within five years we expect people will be able to walk from Clayton to Hillsborough on one continuous 150-mile trail," Dixon and Brewer said.

Still, more money and volunteer help will be needed to make the state-spanning trail a reality, the two said.

An "excellent" fall color show should begin to roll down the mountainsides of western North Carolina in the next couple of weeks and continue through October.

Kathy Matthews, associate professor of biology specializing in plant systematics at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, said in her annual prediction that “2011 should prove to be an excellent year for fall color.”

Depending upon the timing of the first frost, fall colors should peak during the second week of October in the higher elevations, and during the third week of October in the mid-elevations, Matthews told WCU's The Reporter.

Howie Neufeld, Ph.D., professor of Plant Physiology at Appalachian State University in Boone, predicted this week on his The Fall Color Guy blog that the color would peak in the Boone/Grandfather Mountain area the weekend of October 7-9 and "maybe the next weekend farther south around Asheville."

Neufeld said colors in the Highlands/Cashiers area of the Nantahala National Forest peak about the same time as in Boone or just slightly afterward. In the Great Smoky Mountains, he said, "colors will peak in early October at the higher elevations, and then work their way downslope, with a delay of about five days for every 1,000-foot drop in elevation."

In his weekly report for this week, Neufeld said he drove to Linville Falls and Grandfather Mountain State Park over the weekend and found a significant increase in color on the hills compared to last week, though they are still about 80 percent green.

"On Grandfather Mountain, color is very pronounced on the heath balds and rock outcrops," Neufeld writes. "Above 4,500 feet, color is quite advanced, and on the eastern and lower flanks of Grandfather (the side facing the Blue Ridge Parkway) there are one or two ridges with excellent color already. You can get a great view of this from the Beacon Heights parking lot, and also on the rock outcrops at Beacon Heights (take the short trail to the top for spectacular views)."

Beacon Heights, at MP 305.3 on the Parkway, is a trailhead for Section 13 the Mountains-to-Sea Trail and the Tanawha Trail, which goes under the Linn Cove Viaduct.

Goose Creek State Park has reopened on its regular fall schedule of 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., the state Division of Parks and Recreation said on the park's website this morning. Campgrounds and some trails remain closed due to unsafe conditions caused by Hurricane Irene.

Farther south, the Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail reports that extensive storm damage in the Croatan National Forest will likely mean the Neusiok Trail remains closed until next spring.

We've previously reported the National Forest alert that says only three recreation sites in the Croatan have reopened since the late-August hurricane, and about numerous downed trees in the campground at Goose Creek.

The FMST says in an email sent yesterday that "boardwalk, bridges and hundreds of trees were uprooted" along the 20-mile Neusiok, which is Section 36 of the MST.

"The damage is extensive enough that FMST volunteers are estimating that the trail may not reopen until next spring," the group says on its website.

The storm also caused breaches in five places in Section 38 of the MST, the Outer Banks from Ocracoke to Jockey's Ridge State Park. Temporary bridges over the breaches are expected to be in place by early October.