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Gragg Prong & Hunt Fish Falls
Two Saturdays ago (July 26), I decided it was high time for a mountain swimming hole trek. Summer was almost two thirds over, and I still had not made it out of the piedmont. The weather forecast had been looking ideal all week, so I was oping to hit Steels Creek Falls that weekend. Steels Creek is a bit treacherous from what I have read, so it requires a dry day and ideally a buddy or two to save you if you get into a sticky (or slippery) situation. I asked around, but all my friends were booked, so I decided to plan ongoing someplace ostensibly safer. Gragg Prong Falls and Hunt Fish Falls were also on my list of Wilson Creek area swimming holes to check out, and they could both be done in one hike. When I got up on Saturday morning, the forecast had changed from a 20 % chance to a 60 % chance of rain in the mountains, but I had already decided I was going, so I went ahead with my plan. After all, as the tourist industry likes to remind people, “That’s a 40 % chance of nice!”
The directions to get to the parking area were very simple and only required three turns after leaving Greensboro. The last turn took me 6.5 miles down Roseboro Rd, a steep, winding gravel road that leads from Linville to the parking area where a bridge crosses over Gragg Prong Creek. The weather had been decent on the drive up, but it started raining as soon as I parked the car. It was a warm rain, though, and not plan-damningly heavy, so I decided to get started. After all, I was going to get wet anyway, right? Finding my way out of the parking lot was a little confusing. There are multiple trails in the area, and I started off on the wrong trails twice before finding the correct trail on the third try. The correct trail, which follows Gragg Prong downstream, is the blue-blazed Lost Cove Trail (#262), which runs with the white-blazed Mountains-to-Sea Trail (MST) for the portion of the hike that I had planned (total tangent: the MST also runs through the park where I used to work).
Gragg Prong has an upper and lower falls, and a ‘bonus’ waterfall and swimming hole upstream of the upper falls. Since I was hiking downstream, I would come to the bonus hole first. About a half mile into the hike, the trail rose fairly high above the creek bed and then started to go back down again. When I reached the crest of the hill, my GPS indicated that I was adjacent to the bonus hole. There was a fallen tree with a large root span to my right, and I could see a steep side-trail just before the fallen tree leading down to the creek. I scrambled down and came out on a large rock slab overlooking the bonus hole. It was fed by a sliding waterfall, and from there, the creek flowed over the slab I was standing on and under a large rock overhang.
There was a woman there with her kids, and she told me someone had warned her about a yellow jacket nest in the base of a tree further down the trail. I continued to the upper falls, on the lookout for the yellow jacket nest. The problem was that there were yellow jackets hovering around here and there, so it was hard to tell if they were just scouting or hovering around a nest. I came to an area where some people had stopped about 50 feet down the trail, and they said that the nest was somewhere between us. We all descended about 15 feet to the creek to bypass the nest. I had been trying to avoid getting my shoes wet, but I figured that was futile due to all the creek crossings on this trail, so I bit the bullet and walked through the creek. After I felt like I was well beyond where the nest might be, I got back on the trail and continued on to the upper falls. This is the one I was most looking forward to, because it had a large tub in the rock near the top of the waterfall. The trail came out right at the top of the falls, so there was no chance of missing it.
I walked down the sloping rock to see what was below. It had stopped raining by this time, but everything was still wet. I slipped and fell on the way down, but I didn’t get hurt. As strange as it sounds, the smooth, polished mountain rocks seem softer than the blunt, jagged rocks down in the piedmont. Below the falls was a flatter rock slab, which the creek flowed over into a large pool. There was a large primitive campsite on the bank, and a group of about 15 people had laid claim to it.
I went back to the top of the falls and ate my lunch, during which time the sun came out. While I was eating, these two little girls with a roll of toilet paper kept walking off into the woods and returning a couple of minutes later looking unhappy. People were jumping and diving into the tub now that the sun was out, so I figured it had to be pretty deep. I knew I was going to swim there, but it was still about 1.5 miles to Hunt Fish Falls, so I decided I would hit the tub on the way back. I continued down the trail to a point were the trail went up very steeply to the left, and what I could see of the horizon through the trees suggested that the creek dropped significantly here. I took a short side trail to my right and came out on top of the lower falls. It looked like a vertically compressed version of Upper Creek Falls, with less of a drop and more of a slide.
There didn't appear to be a swimming hole at the bottom, but I noticed a sliding waterfall a short distance upstream. I checked it out on the return hike, and it spilled into a small pool and then flowed past a primitive campsite.
After the lower falls, the trail stayed well above the creek. I couldn’t see much for the leaves, but the creek sounded pretty active, and I caught occasional glimpses of whitewater and shimmers, indicating that were probably more cascades and pools below. There were side trails and primitive campsites aplenty in this area. There were also some treacherous spots where the hillside had partially eroded back into the trail, leaving the trail sloping to the side against steep drop-offs (plus it was muddy from the rain). The trail descended to the creek bed as I neared the confluence with Lost Cove Creek. I could hear a hammer hitting wood as I descended, and I saw some more people setting up their equipment at one of the campsites. At the confluence of the creeks, the trail turned and followed Lost Cove Creek upstream. The trail was much smoother after this point. I hiked about a half mile upstream to Hunt Fish Falls. This was a back-to-back set of small waterfalls that spill into a large pool.
There was also a tall but narrow waterfall where a small stream drops down adjacent to the pool. There were about eight other people there. I slid into the pool to cool off, and then I decided to jump off the waterfall, which someone else had just done. He said it was deep, but it was really only about as deep as I am tall, and I hit my foot on the bottom. I was not injured, but it was slightly painful. I was somewhat disappointed to find that the pool wasn’t really over my head, but the water felt nice after the long hike through the hot, steamy woods. Someone mentioned that this place had more snakes than any other swimming hole he had ever been to. I hadn’t seen any snakes, but then he pointed out a brown-banded water snake sunning itself on the rocks below the falls. I got into a conversation with a man about swimming holes in the area. He said that he had gone to Elk Falls the other day, and there were plenty of idiots jumping off of it (to which he admitted doing in his younger days). I told him about Twisting Falls, which is about four miles downstream of Elk Falls and substantially more awesome, and he said he would definitely put that on his to-do list. He then told me about a place called Ravens Cliff Gorge on Upper Creek. He said that the hike to get there involves holding onto a cable and traversing a cliff. That sounded kind of sketchy, but Upper Creek Falls (on the same creek) is the place that started my enthusiasm for swimming holes when I was a kid (Swimming Hole Zero, if you will) and is the standard by which I judge all other swimming holes, so I was interested to hear of more accessible(ish) waterfalls and swimming holes on the same creek. I also mentioned that I had originally wanted to go to Steels Creek instead of coming here, and he said that Steels Creek is great, which made me want to go even more. The allure of Steels Creek is that it has a waterfall with a bunch of kettles and tubs in it, but the one tub in Upper Gragg Prong Falls was going to have to tide me over for today.
Speaking of which, it was past 4 o’clock, and I wanted to allow myself time to swim at Gragg Prong, so I took the 45-minute trek from Hunt Fish Falls back to Upper Gragg Prong Falls. I played in the tub for a long time, jumping into it repeatedly. I swam down to the bottom with my diving mask on, and it was about 10 feet deep on the side where the waterfall spills into it. I also checked out the large pool at the bottom next to the big primitive campsite. It was mostly shallow, but there was a small area that was over my head. I also stopped by the bonus hole on my way back and climbed up the waterfall and back down. The pool was only about six feet deep. I also discovered that there was a small pool under the large rock overhang, also probably about five or six feet deep. Some kids were daring me to slide down the waterfall, but I said it looked too bumpy. They said there was a better slide just downstream from Hunt Fish Falls, which I had neglected to check out.
It was a short walk back to the car from here. The tub in Upper Gragg Prong Falls had easily been the highlight of the trip. I would like to make a return trip at some point to see what Gragg Prong has to offer below the lower falls, and possibly between the lower and upper falls. The round trip from the parking lot to Hunt Fish Falls and back had been about five miles (2.5 each way), and the entire excursion had taken about 5.5 hours. I was ready to head back to Boone and destroy a hamburger.