In today’s post, you will read something you will believe to be mystical, magical, impossible, even. You may not believe my words with your eyes or ears, so I will provide photo documented evidence to prove true.
Last week, my family of six did a 3 mile hike. And no one* complained.
Let me tell you about this magical hike.
I'm talking about the Airport Ridge Hike, starting from Silvercreek and ending at the most beautiful view in all of Snowshoe.
If you want to do the full hike, I recommend following the hike laid out in this video from Snowshoe. And you can also follow it with this map; the trail is outlined in white.
Now, we did not do the full version of this hike. We did a modified version, which I’ll detail here.
First, before I do that, you need to know that I have four kids, currently ages 3-10. We have been doing age appropriate hikes with them their whole life. And one of them (a certain unnamed 8 year old) has always been difficult to get to hike. He loves being outdoors, but it seems like when there is a specific plan and destination (I mean, who doesn’t love that?!?), he likes to buck the system. When he was four years old, we would pack very small trail mix packs and give him certain points on the trail when he would get the packs. It kept him moving, which, at this point, was a huge win.
But on this beautiful, magical, Airport hike, this kid was running ahead and leading the way. When he got to the lookout, he ran back to us yelling to “hurry up” and “you guys won’t believe this!” I nearly cried, just because he’s come so far from the whiny little kid who had to be bribed just to walk a trail.
So, who knows, this hike might actually be terrible. But it will always hold a special place in my heart, because it was our first full-family whine-free hike.
Here’s what we did:
Start out at Silvercreek and walk up the Cubb Run/Can’t Hook slope. Yes, it’s really steep at some places, but you generally get the hardest part out of the way first. Once you pass the lift, just keep walking up. You’ll keep following this semi-access road until you get to Flying Eagle lift. Okay, that was the hardest part. Good job!
Continue to follow the road into the woods until you come out at the amazing viewing point. Take it all in.
Follow the winding road down and to the right. Once you’re on the lower level (you’ll know what that means when you’re there), continue to the right. The path will then split and you’ll see a smaller trail that forks off to the right with a small bee sign. Take that path with the bee sign. This will lead you to the pollinator garden! Continue to follow this through the pollinator fields all the way to the picnic table and info board about the pollinator garden.
Once you get to the picnic table, you’ll enter the woods by the table. It’s a small opening and is marked only by a small piece of marking plastic tied to the tree branch. Enter the woods and take the right fork. After a while in the woods, it’ll fork again, take the left fork.
This will now be the second difficult stretch of the hike. But it’s not that long, and it’s really pretty in the woods. But there are some narrow parts of the trail and it’s quite steep in some areas. But you GOT THIS.
You’ll continue to wind through the woods, sort of parallel to where you hiked when you were outside the woods. If in doubt, stay as close as you can to the ridge and make sure to stay on the marked paths where small trees have been cut.
After winding through the woods for a good 15-25 minutes, you’ll come back out at the airport overlook. Then you just follow that access road back down the slopes like you came up.
As always, remember that there is no cell service here and it’s important to let people know when and where you’re going, bring water, and travel with a map or GPS location services turned on. Many map apps allow for loading the map while in network and then it will use GPS to track you once you’re out of the service area.
Happy hiking!