Sunday, November 29, 2020

A new place to walk

Yesterday took the family down to White Pines Nature Preserve between Pittsboro and Sanford. It's managed by the Triangle Land Conservancy (thanks Bo Howes!) and is at the confluence of the Deep and Rocky Rivers, neither of which I had ever heard of. Most surprisingly, the hills are really pretty high, so tall, in fact, and north-facing, that it creates a cooler microclimate (often 8-10 cooler than Pittsboro, about 8 miles away).

I highly recommend parking in the first parking lot on the left as you come in, rather than going all the way down to the end. That way you end up taking a trail that really gives you the full sense of the size of the hills, with a descent marked by switchbacks of the sort you typically only see in real mountains.

On the way back we skipped stopping in to downtown Pittsboro and the excellent used book store there. Mary and I had just been there on the way back from canvassing in Sanford a few weeks back, and everybody's book stacks are pretty tall. But it was probably not the right moment to add us in as Covid vectors. Plus we had the wedding of my first cousin once removed Nola to watch on Zoom. Though the video quality was not great, we were able to clearly make out the ringbearer, who was the dog of the marrying couple. We were sad not to make it in person, but they did the right thing epidemiologically to keep it small.  

No comments: