NCHikes.com: an exploration of North Carolina by foot

I’m Joe Miller and I grew up in Colorado. Oddly, I didn’t discover a passion for the outdoors until moving to Texas in the late 1980s. (Oddly, because there was no outdoors in North Texas to get passionate about). After five years in Dallas, I was released to North Carolina in January 1992. My first Saturday in town I went to Umstead State Park, explored for six hours and haven’t stopped exploring since. For 11 years, I was the outdoor adventure columnist for The News & Observer in Raleigh, doing everything from hiking and biking to rock climbing and scuba diving. Today, I write about health, fitness and the outdoors at GetGoingNC.com, and have written three books, “Hiking the Triangle,” (The News & Observer, 1998), “100 Classic Hikes in North Carolina,” (The Mountaineers, 2007) and “Backpacking North Carolina,” (UNC Press, Spring 2011).

NCHikes.com focuses on exploring by foot, my favorite way to experience North Carolina because it affords the best opportunity for savoring the ecological diversity of a state that starts with sand dunes, swamps and maritime forests at the coast and ends in the west in a spruce fir forest atop Clingman’s Dome.

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