PHOTOS BY HARRY LYNCH - hlynch@newsobserver.com
Umstead State Park education specialist Sean Higgins, right, led a hike of about 50 area residents of all ages on the park's first New Year's Day hike along Pott's Branch Trail Sunday morning.
RALEIGH -- While the champagne and noise-maker crowd slept, a band of 50 hikers and five dogs took a mile-long walk through Umstead State Park, celebrating the opening hours of 2012 with the chipmunks, ferns and moss-covered logs.
For an hour, education specialist Sean Higgins led the group down a muddy trail, over boulders and into the middle of Potts Branch, where he splashed his face with fresh water to welcome the new year - explaining a Thai tradition.
"You may see a bobcat or a river otter," he said. "And all kinds of salamanders make Umstead their home."
Sunday's jaunt marked Umstead's first New Year's Day hike, part of a campaign organized by state parks nationwide aimed at rejuvenating minds and bodies through outdoor exercise. Across North Carolina, rangers and volunteers led walks through 28 state parks.
The N.C. Division of Parks and Recreation hopes to make what it calls First Day Hikes an annual tradition.
"This is not something I would normally do," hiker Paul Perryman, 37, of Durham said Sunday morning. "It's never as painful as I think it's going to be."
Umstead covers 5,500 acres northwest of Raleigh, offering more than 20 miles of trails. Hiking straight across it could take a brisk walker three hours.
As he led the hikers, Higgins stopped to point out Christmas ferns at the edge of the path with leaves that look like Santa's sleigh, and to show how beech trees keep their leaves rustling in the wind late into the year.
From the top of a large rock, he made the case for moss. Three types grew on a single log.
"These mosses may seem boring," he said, "but if you really study them, these mosses are fighting each other!"
Alex Fishbough, 7, listened carefully, carrying a sprig of mistletoe he had found.
Alex just joined his Raleigh neighborhood's tribe in the YMCA's Y Guides program, and he and his father, Craig, took their first 2-mile hike - twice as long as most of the walkers Sunday. By finishing, Alex could earn his first feather.
"His tribe's name is the Mighty Lightning Bolts," Craig Fishbough said.
Hikers took Sunday's temperature, near 70 degrees in the Triangle, as a sign of good fortune.
And at the end of the hike, offering thanks to the wilderness, Higgins made the sound of a crow's caw into the woods.
Everyone cawed along with him.
