Crowders Mountain State Park - Linwood Road Access — Attraction in Gastonia

Located about 30 min from Charlotte NC, this is the closest mountain hike in the area.

With 11 different, well-marked trails, of varying intensities-this State Park is one you definitely don't want to miss!

For a great quick and intense way to get your heart rate up, use the Linwood Access Parking and take the Backside Trail and enjoy the steps 😉 Once you reach the top, you are treated to some beautiful views and can see the Charlotte downtown skyline. You can then go down the Tower trail for an added 1.5 miles or back down the way you came up for an approximate 1.5 mile out and back. Joggers often use these trails for training and the great thing is that they are very wide trails so you don't have to worry about bottlenecks or passing.

At the Sparrow Springs Parking, you will find the main visitor center with educational/science museum, as well as the lake, and some other great hiking trails. My favorite at this access point is the Pinnacle. It's about 4 miles round trip although you can add on about .2 miles and take Turn back trail to get back to the parking lot for some different scenery.

My favorite thing to do is add trails together. I recommend Backside to Rocktop to Turn back to Pinnacle to Crowders and back down Backside if you want to get a nice 10 mile hike in.

Family and pet friendly park with other activities such as camping and...

The weather was just about perfect at 70 degrees. Anything more, it would have been too warm. You have two options navigating the trail as it is a loop. You can choose to hit the stairs first, which means getting the hard part out of the way. Or, you can take the trail going counterclockwise, and it will be a gradual increase on elevation. I chose to take the stairs.

Once past the stairs, it is a short hike to the first overlook. The views are fabulous. Continuing on, you pass the TV tower and start into the rock trail, which was my favorite. Rock scrambling was fantastic with plenty of opportunity for great photos.

After the rock pass is pretty much a mile and a half walk through the woods back to your starting point. All in all, it was a great hike, and one I plan to do again. Plan for about 2 1/2 hours unless you don't...

This was our second hike up the trail going up to the summit using Backside trail. What we liked about this trail is that it had steady unrelenting strenuous hike right from get go, and the trail was like a dirt track wide enough for a car to drive. Then there was steep flight of stairs at the end reaching the summit. The trail, as usual was well blazed and there were no confusion intersection with other trails.

The view from the summit was spectacular and on the sunny day we could see Charlotte down town up in the distance.

We came down using the Tower trail which is actually the dirt roads leading up to the communication tower close to the summit.

Our next hike will be to go up using the Tower trail and then take Rocktop trail, Crowders trail, and Pinnacle trail leading up to the...