views, waterfalls, and biodiversity. Catawba Falls offers a stunning waterfall at the end of a relatively gentle path.
South
Variety characterizes the routes in this section. Turkey Pen is a multi-use trailhead, hosting equestrians, mountain bikers, and hunters as well as hikers. Hikers, writers, and families all love to visit Carl Sandburg’s Connemara Farms in Flat Rock. And DuPont State Forest offers stunning waterfalls and plenty of trails that are worth exploring time and time again.
West
West of Asheville, this guidebook leads you primarily into Pisgah National Forest, including Shining Rock Wilderness and Middle Prong Wilderness. Here, you will find that the longest and most challenging routes in this guidebook lie west of Asheville, at Shining Rock and Cold Mountain. The west region also features Black Balsam, Graveyard Fields, and Mount Pisgah—some of the most popular hiking destinations in our area.
How to Use This Guidebook
The following information walks you through this guidebook’s organization to make it easy and convenient to plan great hikes.
Overview Map and Map Key
The overview map on the inside front cover depicts the location of the primary trailhead for all 35 of the hikes described in this book. The numbers shown on the overview map pair with the map key on the opposite page. Each hike’s number remains with that hike throughout the book. Thus, if you spot an appealing hiking area on the overview map, you can flip through the book and find those hikes easily by their numbers at the top of each profile page.
Trail Maps and Map Legend
In addition to the overview map, a detailed map of each hike’s route appears with its profile. On this map, symbols indicate the trailhead, the complete route, significant features, facilities, and topographic landmarks such as creeks, overlooks, and peaks. A legend identifying the map symbols used throughout the book appears on the inside back cover.
To produce the highly accurate maps in this book, I used a handheld GPS unit to gather data while hiking each route, and then sent that data to the publisher’s expert cartographers.
Despite the high quality of the maps in this guidebook, the publisher and I strongly recommend that you always carry an additional map—or maps—such as the ones noted in each hike profile’s introductory, key-info “Maps” listing.
Elevation Profiles
This graphic illustration represents the rises and falls of the trail as viewed from the side, over the complete mileage, of that trail. On the diagram’s vertical axis, or height scale, the number of feet indicated between each tick mark lets you visualize the ascent or descent. To avoid making flat hikes look steep and steep hikes appear flat, varying height scales provide an accurate image of each route’s hiking difficulty. For example, one hike’s scale might change 800 feet, as shown for the hike at Carl Sandburg’s Connemara Farms, while another stretches nearly 3,000 feet, as shown for Cold Mountain.
If the profile does not include the diagram, that simply means that the elevation change is so insignificant that it would appear as a virtually flat path regardless of the cartographer’s height scales described above.
However, as you will, in “The Hike Profile” section, the key-info list that introduces each route in this guidebook always includes a text line for “elevation,” which specifies the altitude at the trailhead. This item also notes the elevation at the route’s peak—or at the lowest point, if the trailhead elevation is the peak. (If the difference between the highest and lowest altitudes is negligible, that also is stated.)
The Hike Profile
This book contains a concise and informative narrative of each hike from beginning to end. The text will get you from a well-known road or highway to the trailhead, through the twists and turns of the hike route, back to the trailhead, and to notable nearby attractions, if there are any. Each profile opens with the route’s star ratings, GPS trailhead coordinates, and a lineup of other key information. Below is an explanation of the introductory elements that give you a snapshot of each of the 35 routes in Five-Star Trails: Asheville.
STAR RATINGS
Five-Star Trails is the Menasha Ridge Press series of guidebooks geared to selected US urban areas such as Asheville, North Carolina. Authors for the series are locally based, experienced outdoors writers. For research, they personally hike a variety of trails—often creating unique routes by marrying sections of different trails.
To determine worthy selections for this series, authors assess the qualities of each route in the five categories shown below. Each trail must average high ratings among the five categories; or it must be outstanding in one or more of these categories. For example, the author may award a trail only one star for “Condition” but five stars for “Scenery” and include it in the book. Why? Because, based on the author’s own trek, it is well worth hiking the “rocky, overgrown, or often muddy” path in order to witness and savor its “unique, picturesque panorama.”
Following is the explanation for the rating system of one to five stars in each of the five categories.
FOR SCENERY:
FOR TRAIL CONDITION:
FOR CHILDREN:
