Trails of Chatham County: TLC White Pines
Location:
Web Site: http://www.triangleland.org/lands/tlc/white_pines_np.shtml
Directions: (I’m copying this from the TLC site as it seems a bit tricky getting there the 1st time!)
From Pittsboro: Go south on US 15-501 for 8 miles from the Chatham County Courthouse traffic circle. Turn left on River Fork Road (SR 1958), the first left after crossing the Rocky River bridge. On River Fork Road, turn right immediately and proceed for 1.7 miles. Turn right at the stop sign and continue 0.5 miles to the TLC Preserve sign. Turn left and drive about 1/8 mile to the parking area on your right. More parking is available through the small lot, under the powerline.
Distance: ~ 3 miles (if you do all the trails)
Difficulty: moderate (a couple steep climbs but relatively short)
Description: Quite secluded — the drive back seems like you are going quite a ways in. Gorgeous land and it is cool to see where the two rivers merge — especially when water is flowing fast after a good rain, but then it will be muddy. Bugs can be bad in the summer. There are different trails and if you want to do them all, you have to double back on a few of them.
Map of trails from TLC (click for larger image):
GPS track:
In order to get all the trails on the GPS track, I had to double back a few times (e.g. the Comet Trail, part of the White Pines Trail).
Photos:
When you park at the trail heads you have a couple options on which way to go. This shows the marquee and the start of the White Pines Trail, and a down tree blocking the start of one of the trails. But it is easy to get around. There are normally a good supply of information booklets in the marquee, and they have the map included above…
If you take the School Kids “loop” near the bottom and by the Rocky River, you come up on an old cable bridge… not much to see except one of the cables and the river these days.
The benches at the David Howells memorial… This site sits high and sort of overlooks the Rocky, but even in the fall and winter the trees are pretty dense so the view is limited.
Lots of vernal pools depending on the season and how much rain we’ve had…
Here is the other option you have at the start. This is really the Gilbert Yager Trail, not the River trail. The sign is saying the River trail is 1 mile away. I did not get that the 1st time I read it.
Trails of Chatham County: Haw River @ US 64 West
Location:
You can park at US 64 and the Haw River “intersection” on the West side of the river, and hike north or south; or park at the Robeson Creek Canoe Access point off Hanks Chapel Road and hike north.
Level: moderate to strenuous depending on water conditions and how far off trail/river you have to go… South of 64 there are some “cliffs” you may have to climb up and over depending on route selection
Description: unofficial and unmaintained, or at best “semi” maintained by the boaters and fishermen that use this section… (And you will occasionally run in to hikers, but not often in my experience.) No markers on the trails, and while most sections are obvious, some are not. Just keep the river on the East and don’t wander too far west and you should not get lost.
North and South (partial) GPS markers:
Here are GPS tracks on both the north and south side. The south side is only a partial as the water level was too high (10 feet, just under flood level, on the USGS Bynum Gauge) to make it all the way to Gabriel’s Bend. (Well, at least with the two kids with me!)
(North zoomed in)
A bit more detail on the north end… There are some sections that may be a bit of a bushwhack depending on conditions. Just keep the river on the east side of you and you can’t get lost. I.e. don’t wander too far to the west. I think I could make it all the way to 15/501 on this path and hope to try it some day. There is a split just north of 64 that leads you up and over/around a section of the river that will not be passible in high water (perhaps 6-7 feet on the gauge). I went both ways so both routes would be visible in the GPS track, but again, the lower section is much less defined and at points you are on rocks on the edge of the river.
South (partial) zoomed in…
Again, could not make it all the way to US 64 this day, but I will update this the next time I make the whole route. Normally when you park at Robeson creek you do not have to head as far away from the river as the image below shows, but the water was very high this day, just under 11 feet or flood level on the Bynum Gauge. (Of course the water level is not shown in this satellite image)… When the water is is high, the section near the parking lot is under water. Due to the high water there was a lot of off trail hiking as you can tell from the two slightly different routes on the out and back.
Photos (North of 64):
Some of the sites you will see on
If you choose to go the “low” route, or the route closer to the river than up and over, it becomes much less of a trail, and in some places more of a bushwhack and/or scramble. If the water is high, this section would not be passible. Check the USGS Bynum Guage. Anything over 6 ft and your probably will need to swim it. I.e. don’t do it!
This is what I call a “wash up,” which is where all the trash that comes down river on a big rain ends up. I’d like to go back and clean this up one day.
This is what I wore out when I took the GPS on the north section.. It was a bit muddy!
Photos (south of 64):
South of 64 is the most popular white water rafting section of the Haw, though you will see some on the section north of the river as well.
The Reason for God. Tim Keller.
After a friend gave me The Prodigal God and I read it in a couple of nights, I thought I should read more from Tim Keller — afterall, he is the pastor of a PCA church, as is Jim Belcher, author of Deep Church, and PCA just seems to keep popping up in much of my recent reading and in local conversations.
The Reason for God is at times much more apologetic than I typically care for, but at other times really spoke to me in ways I did not expect. Two primary areas that it makes me want to investigate further are the Doctrine of Hell, especially in light of recent discussions surrounding hell as portrayed in Judgement House, and the Kingdom of God as described in Deep Church and other recent readings as a renewed and restored “creation,” here on Earth.
I think, because there is so much to this book, that I will just copy and paste the bulleted list of quotes from my EverNote notebook:
Quotes:
- The people most passionate about social justice were moral relativists, while the morally upright didn’t seem to care about the oppression going on all over the world.
- As a child, the plausibility of faith can rest on the authority of others, but when we reach adulthood there is a need for personal, firsthand experience as well.
- … faith journeys are never simply intellectual exercises. [emphasis mine]
- Each side should accept that both religious belief and skepticism are on the rise. [ Two sides are religious and non-religious, believers and skeptics. ]
- A faith without some doubts is like a body without any antibodies in it. People who blithely go through life too busy or indifferent to ask hard questions about why they believe as they do will find themselves defenseless against either the experience of tragedy or the probing questions from a smart skeptic. A Person’s faith can collapse almost overnight if she has failed over the years to listen patiently to her own doubts, which should only be discarded after long reflection.
- Believers should acknowledge and wrestle with doubts — not only their own but their friends’ and neighbors’. It is no longer sufficient to hold beliefs just because you have inherited them. Only if you struggle long and hard with objections to your faith will you be able to provide grounds for your beliefs to skeptics, including yourself, that are plausible rather than ridiculous or offensive.
- But even as believers should learn to look for reasons behind their faith, skeptics must learn to look for a type of faith hidden within their reasoning.
- It would be inconsistent to require more justification for Christian belief than you do for your own.
- The reality is that we all make truth claims of some sort and it is very hard to weigh them responsibly, but we have no alternative but to try to do so.
- What is religion then? It is a set of beliefs that explain what life is all about, who we are, and the most important things that human beings should spend their time doing.
- Redeemer lacked the pompous and highly sentimental language they found emotionally manipulative in other churches..
- [The] resistance to authority in moral matters is now a deep current in our culture. [not just moral, but all matters!]
- In our society many people have worked extremely hard to pursue careers that pay well rather than fit their talents and interests. Such careers are straightjackets that in the long run stifle and dehumanize us.
- Disciplines and constraints, then, liberate us only when they fit with the reality of our nature and capacities. A fish, because it absorbs oxygen from the water rather than the air, is only free if it is restricted and limited to water.
- Freedom, then, is not the absence of limitations and constraints, but it is finding the right ones, those that fit our nature and liberate us.
- When people have done injustice in the name of Christ they are not being true to the spirt of the one who himself died as a victim of injustice and who called for the forgiveness of his enemies.
- Instead of trying to shape our desires to fit reality, we now seek to control and shape reality to fit our desires.
- Our peer group and and primary relationships shape our beliefs much more than we want to admit.
- Christians who accept the Bible’s authority agree that the primary goal of Biblical interpretation is to discover the Biblical author’s original meaning as he sought to be understood by his audience. This has always meant interpreting a text according to its literary genre.
- “Genesis 1 has the earmarks of poetry and is therefore a song about the wonder and meaning of God’s creation. Genesis 2 is an account of how it happened.
- We come to every individual evaluation with all sorts of experiences and background beliefs that strongly influence our thinking and the way our reason works.
- CS Lewis: I believe the son has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
- He looked at one argument for God after another, though many of them had a great deal of merit, he found that ultimately every one of them was rationally avoidable at some point… He was assuming “strong rationalism” which itself has not airtight proof… Then we went back to review the lines of reasoning and instead of calling the proofs looked at them as clues…
- Science cannot prove the continued regularity of nature, it can only take it on faith.
- … innate desires correspond to real objects that can satisfy them…
- .. Dawkins admits that since we are the product of natural selection, we can’t completely trust our own senses. After all, evolution is interested only in preserving adaptive behavior, not true belief…
- Even when we believe with all our minds that life is meaningless, we can’t simply live that way.
- pride is the enemy of hope
- “Sin is: in despair not wanting to be oneself before God… Faith is: that the self in being itself is grounded transparently in God.” – Kierkegaard
- Our need for worth is so powerful that whatever we base our identity and value on we essentially deify.
- Every person must find some way to justify their existence…. Every one is building their identity on something.
- Sin is not simply doing bad things… It is putting good things in the pace of God.
- “Your father has defeated you, as long as you hate him. You will stay trapped in your anger unless you forgive him thoroughly from the heart and begin to love him.”
- If you don’t allow your children to hinder your freedom in work and play at all, and if you only get to your children when it doesn’t inconvenience you, your children will grow up physically only. In all sorts of other ways they will remain emotionally needy, troubled, and over dependent.
- All life-changing love toward people with serious needs is a substitutional sacrifice. If you become personally involved with them, in some way, their weaknesses flow toward you as our strengths flow toward them.
- We should repent not only for what we have done wrong, but our motivations behind our good works…
- It is not the strength of your faith but the object of your faith that saves you.
Trails of Chatham County: Jordan Lake – New Hope Overlook
Location: The Jordan Lake New Hope Park can be reached via US 1, exit 81 at Pea Ridge road (head west after you exit) or via US 64 on the east side of the lake, by heading south on Beaver Creek and then taking a right on to Pea Ridge. Pass through the gate and take the 1st right towards the boat ramp. The trail head is at the beginning of the parking area on the far left.
Distance: 3-6 miles (two different loops, plus the out and backs to the primitive camp sites)
Difficulty: moderate to strenuous (there are a couple tough hills for this area, that make it seem a bit mountainous)
(The GPS tracker I am using tends to underestimate mileage on these kinds of trails, so the mileage on the map above is slightly off.)
Description: New Hope is my favorite hiking destination in Chatham County. It can be quite mountainous and is often secluded — it is rare that I see more than 1 or 2 other people out there, and typically I see none. (Though that can be said for many of the trails I plan on reviewing!)
About 100 meters from the trail head the trail splits. If you stay left, you start off on a tough little hill before settling into some easier running. After crossing a couple of gravel roads, you can take the out and back to primitive camp site B, or continue on. If you stay right at the beginning, you reach an inlet where you sometimes can catch beavers playing — look closely and you will see their den. Keep going and you will find a short 50 meter branch to a bench that overlooks the largest part of Jordan Lake. You can see all the boaters here on nice days.
The two trails form a bit of a figure 8, so whichever way you go, there is an option near the middle to cut back to the trail head.
If you take the trail up to primitive camp site B you reach a parking lot. From there you can get in another 1000 meters or so by running all the way down to the lastcamp site (where I have backpacked to before). I don’t have that shown on the GPS track but will add it when I have the time to complete the entire trail.
Note: This area has an “unofficial” but maintained grassy/gravel road to the Jordan Lake dam area. As you go up the gravel roads towards camp site B you can follow the grassy road towards the dam. And from there it loops back out towards Pea Ridge Road. I’ll include another map that shows that road, and while it doesn’t show an actual connection to the dam area, it would not be hard to trek it… This may get a bit long for most people for a hike but I have ridden a mountain bike on it.
Photos:
stay tuned… none taken on last trip
Trails of Chatham County: Jordan Lake — Vista Point
Location: The Jordan Lake Vista Point trails are located in the Vista Point recreation area of Jordan Lake. On US 64 on the West side of the lake, turn South on to North Peak Ridge Road and drive approximately 3 miles to the park entrance.
Distance: blue loop: ~2.5 miles red loop: ~3 miles
Difficulty: Easy
(The GPS tracker I am using tends to underestimate mileage on these kinds of trails, so the mileage on the map above is slightly off.)
Description: There are two loops, a red (~3 miles) and blue (~2.5 miles), which can easily be combined. The terrain in this area of Jordan Lake is quite flat with less than 70 feet of elevation difference throughout the entire trail system.
If you park at the ranger’s office just outside the gate, you can start on the blue trail, which loops around to an old tobacco barn before heading towards the group camp area. Just before the camp area is a large grass field. It is best to hike around this if the grass has not been mowed recently — it can be thick and slow going, and the chiggers are bad in the spring and summer. Just before the grass field the trail is a bit hard to follow as a few blazes are missing, but you can just keep the road on your left and the lake on your right and look towards the field. At the group camp area you have exit the camp area gate and cross the road to hit the red trail.
The red trail is about 3 miles long and first runs out along a long peninsula with views of the wide open area of Jordan Lake, eventually loops near the RV camp sites, before hitting one of the shelters. From the Shelter the trail either heads down to the beach, or you can cut through the parking lot, cross the road, head back towards the park entrance, and pick up the blue loop again at the group camp site. It actually continues when you cross the road but this section is not really maintained and doesn’t really go anywhere except back to the group camp area. I normally just take the road back to the came area instead.
Photos:
(I’ll try to add more as I go out each time.)
The trail head for the blue trail at the ranger’s office.
The marquee at the trail head.
Trails of Chatham County
Over the coming months, I’ll be working on a blog series of all the trails in Chatham County (at least the ones I know about!). I’ll be going out to hike or, more likely, run the trails, tracking them on a GPS, taking some pictures, and giving some comments. This post will be updated as I go and serve as a “home page” for this series.
(Click on a blue bubble to see the trail name.)
Links to specific trail posts:
- Jordan Lake: Vista Point
- Jordan Lake: New Hope
- Jordan Lake: Sea Forth
- Triangle Land Conservatory: White Pines
- American Tobacco Trail
- Haw River @ 64 West side
- Haw River @ 64 East side
- Haw River @ 15/501
- Briar Chapel
If I’m missing any, let me know and I’ll be sure to add them. I love to explore new places!
The Promise. Chaim Potok.
After reading “The Chosen” a few weeks ago, I had to follow with another Potok book, and of course went with “The Promise,” which is somewhat of a sequel. (More just a follow-on book with the same characters later in life than a sequel.)
Two main points stuck me:
- the portrayal of different father-son relationships. (How one was so close, at least in terms of studying Talmud but additionally in seeking each other out for guidance and discussion in the struggles of life, while others were strained in various ways.)
- the amazing study of their faith as part of a lifelong journey — but so much more dedicated and in depth than what is typical today, at least in the part of society I see around me
Some quotes that are all mostly self explanatory (And I’ve bolded one I that has resonated with me the most recently):
- “What energies we waste fighting one another…”
- “It’s always easier to learn something than to use what you’ve learned.”
- “You understand what it is to make a choice…? A choice tells the world what is most important to a human being. When a man has a choice to make he chooses what is most important to him, and that choice tells the world what kind of man he is.”
- “A person must know who he is. A person must understand himself, improve himself, learn his weaknesses in order to overcome them. It is hard for a person to understand hi own weaknesses…”
- “The Master of the Universe has so created the world that everything that can be good can also be evil. It is mankind that makes a thing good or evil … depending on how we use the wonders we have been given.”
- “…men hesitate to talk to their fathers. A boy always wishes to be able to talk to his father. And a father waits for the boy to become a man so they can talk as men. And then the boy becomes a man and no longer needs the father. It is a strange thing.”
- “That is the way the world is… Each generation thinks it fights new battles. But the battles are the same. Only the people are different.”
Music Monday: TSO’s Night Castle finally released…
Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s long awaited Night Castle is finally out! TSO is one of my favorite bands — they #4 in my “top played artist” lists on iTunes over the past 5+ years. Considering 3 of their 4 albums are Christmas stories, that is pretty impressive. If you like Rock Opera, go get it today, for $3.99 at amazon (today only at that price).
Backwoods Orienteering Blue 10/18
It was a blustery day, but never managed to rain. Joseph and Ruth set some very difficult courses including an 8.9K Blue course. We had a couple of injuries, Pat Downey got a severe cut on his leg requiring medical attention by stepping into a stump hole where someone discarded some broken glass, and Patrik Heuman tripped over some barbed wire and got a bloody nose when he fell. Pat, Jeff Eichman, and Don Childrey helped Patrik and then Jeff and Don helped Pat. For your sacrifice helping an injured comrade instead of being disqualified for not finishing (DNF) you get a “Sporting Withdrawal” (SPW) for being a good sport. Also thanks to Josef for setting out 24 controls early in the morning and helped with starts and finishes, to Joseph for teaching the class, and to Holly, Bill, Mihai, Vladimir, Artem, Bill, and Paul for retrieving controls after the event. (Please let me know if I forgot you).
Results show:
Blue Course: 21 KP 8.9 km
1 Brian Thompson 1:40:45
2 Sean M Butler 1:40:55
3 Artem Kazantsev 2:08:39
4 Mihai Ibanescu 2:10:29
5 Patrik Heuman 2:18:11
Jeffrey Eichman SPW
Donald Childrey SPW
Patrick Downie SPW
Pierre Nyquist DNF
Miriam Noren DNF
Stanley Matsson DNF
Daniel Varner & Daniel Byars DNF
Ernie, Brian, and I ran the course together (so it is odd there is a 10s discrepancy!), and I have to say it would have been VERY tough solo. I likely would have been a DNF, there were so many tough controls! But with 3 of us, we were able to find almost all of them pretty quickly — only off on a couple which you can see in the split.
Brian pretty much dragged us through the course. :-)
Deep Church. Jim Belcher.
I stumbled across the link to The Deep Church on the Inter-webs, and the words on the front page struck a chord…
Feel caught between the traditional church and the emerging church? Discover a third way: deep church. C. S. Lewis used the phrase “deep church” to describe the body of believers committed to mere Christianity. Unfortunately church in our postmodern era has been marked by a certain shallowness.
After reading it, I feel like I have found what I have been looking for, even though I could not pinpoint exactly what it was I was looking before before having read it. (Does that make sense?) In several recent posts I have lamented the fact of apparent shallowness in the area in terms of doctrine, so the words above definitely caught my attention.
What is funny is that my pre-conception of “The Emerging Church”was way off. I had assumed it was the large, mega-church movement with contemporary worship services. However, that is not it at all… It is a movement that criticizes the traditional church in seven key areas (Captivity to Enlightenment rationalism, a narrow view of salvation, belief before belonging, uncontextualized worship, ineffective preaching, weak ecclesiology, and Tribalism). I will not get into those seven criticisms here — you should read the book for that — other than to say that I found, as I read the details of each, that I shared some aspects of the criticisms myself.
Belcher takes the time to expand on each criticism thoroughly, but then points out where he feels the emerging church (sometimes) goes too far. I again found myself agreeing with him on many many points — while I share the views of the issues the emerging folks see with the traditional church, I also agree with Belcher’s view on just about every point where he thinks they over do it.
The main purpose of the book is to define a third way, beyond traditional and emerging. Of course there is no way to summarize the entire book, but one of the basic tenets is agreeing on the foundations of the faith as outlined in the early creeds, and letting everything else slide a little. We have tried to follow this principle of primary vs. secondary doctrine with Haw River Christian Academy, and I strongly feel it is always the way to go.
I have started using Evernote to keep my reading notebook (it’s a great service! keeps my notes synced to the cloud and I can get to them via any computer or my phone, changes sync automagically, etc.) I have a tremendous amount of notes from this book. That means a couple of things — there are either great quotes or there are passages that really make me think, and I want to be able to come back to them.
Both fit here…
- “There is a depth in the ancient church that is very up to date.” [ and therefore it is worth honoring the tradition of the old church...\
- "The Enlightenment quest for certainty based on unassailable reason and science is a dead end... It cannot be pulled off. It has never been done." [We (those of us currently alive) are all children of the Enlightenment, and therefore Children of Reason, and that is so difficult to put aside.. But it needs to be in questions of faith. Not that you can't use logic and reasoning in apologetic argumentation, but that there are sometimes things that go beyond just that...]
- “the next day I contacted the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) … I enquired about church planting.” [this one stands out because so many CCS schools are backed by PCA churches! And PCA just keeps coming up in strange places, yet there is no PCA church here... :-/ ]
- “oh you are describing Redeemer Presbyterian Church in NYC…” [This also stood out as I had just read two Tim Keller books, and his church is also PCA...]
- “We train our members to read discerningly, to think for themselves and to be enriched by other traditions even as they dig deep in the soil of their own tradition.” [ nice to hear! ]
- “Hermeneutical Circle” truth neither starts with knowledge that leads to faith nor with faith that leads to knowledge. How do we get into this circle? The starting point lies beyond us, with the Holy Spirit who places us inside the faith – knowledge circle…
I guess that is good for now. I highly recommend the book for anyone that has never felt 100% at home at their church, and even if you do feel at home, I think this book could provide growth opportunities none-the-less.
