About Southern Hiker

Southern Hiker is about walking in the Southern Appalachians: which trail, in which month, from which trailhead, and what it actually asks of you. One mountain chain across three states, where the practical differences between them - permits, bear rules, what closes in winter - matter more than the state lines suggest. The test for every page is whether it changes a decision.

Pages are organised around trails and the towns you start from, because that is how the decision is made: nobody searches for a county, they search for Alum Cave. A trail gets a page when there is something specific to say about it - a closure, a permit, a parking problem, a hazard that the standard write-up omits - rather than to complete a list.

Facts come from primary sources. Permits, quotas, parking tags and closures are checked against the National Park Service and the relevant national forest, and seasonal road status against the agency that closes the road. Where a trail has changed - the Chimney Tops pinnacle has been shut since the 2016 fires, which most older guides still describe as open - the page says so and says when. Anything numeric carries the date it was checked, because a price without a date is not information. Geographic data comes from GeoNames and OpenStreetMap, photographs from Wikimedia Commons under their individual Creative Commons licences, and time zone data from the IANA database.

We do not accept payment for a placement, a ranking or a favourable review. Where a link earns a commission, the page carrying it says so. We do not claim to have tested something we have not: plan details and prices that come from a provider rather than from our own checking are labelled as such. And we do not publish a page to fill a gap in a keyword list.

If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it and say that we did. Email [email protected] with the page and what is inaccurate. Corrections to a specific fact are made on the page, and the update date on the page changes with them.