Yellow Fork Falls
Jun. 10th, 2017 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flyminion
It was sunny in the mountains last Saturday, and I felt guilty for passing up the opportunity to take advantage of that, so I decided to do back-to-back swimming hole treks this weekend to make up for it since the forecast looked pretty rain-free. Today I went to Yellow Fork Falls, which is on the opposite side of Linville Gorge from the Wilson Creek area. This is the first Kevin Adams inspired swimming hole trek that I have done, as I would probably have never discovered this one without his North Carolina Waterfalls book. I was able to find a couple of blogs about it after doing an internet search, but it seems to mostly be under the radar. This one was currently at the top of my swimming hole hit list in the Boone/Morganton area because the clear blue swimming hole looked similar to the one at Devil’s Bathtub, which has recently become overrun with tourists after going viral on social media. I was hopeful that Yellow Fork could become my surrogate Devil’s Fork.Although the hike is fairly short (1.1 miles, according to my fitness tracker), I didn’t want to solo this particular location because it is pretty secluded, and the trailhead is, as Kevin Adams puts it, nondescript. My friend Ty had recently moved to Asheville and was up for checking out some of the waterfalls in the area, so we met up at a gas station along I-40 and drove out into the middle of nowhere. I caught a glimpse of the mouth of Linville Gorge as the paved road gave way to gravel. I had the trailhead marked in my GPS (coordinates courtesy of Kevin Adams’ book), which was fortunate, as the trailhead is indeed nondescript. We walked along the road and had trouble finding it even with the GPS. We finally just went into the woods at an area that didn’t look too thick, and we noticed the trail to our left. We probably would have found the trailhead if we had gone ten feet further down the road. The trail was worn, but it was also narrow and not pruned. It was not very steep until we got near the creek, and we even had to climb down a wooden ladder as we neared the waterfall.
The waterfall drops about ten feet over a rock ledge and then cascades about 20 feet down a pile of boulders into a clear, blue pool.
Someone had tied a small rope to a tree branch and jammed a stick through the rope to use as a handlebar, but it didn't look like you would be able to swing far enough out to drop into the deep water.
At the downstream end of the pool, the creek drops into a small hole beneath a large rock and disappears underground. The creek then cascades probably ten feet inside a large rock crevice and emerges into a second pool. We climbed down the rocks to check out the lower pool, but it only looked about four feet deep. I tried to take a picture of the cascade inside the cavern, but it was too dark for my camera to really pick up anything. You can sort of see it in the video clip, but I had to turn the gamma way down to expose the waterfall.
We went back to the main waterfall and tried to get into the pool. After easing in up to my thighs, I just fell forward and swam across. My thermometer was out of batteries, so I don’t know the exact temperature of the water, but I’m guessing low 60’s, because it certainly felt comparable to Devil’s Bathtub. I swam across the pool and climbed up the rock pile beside the waterfall. Ty couldn’t bring himself to get all the way in just yet, so he worked his way around the outer edge. After climbing on the rocks next to the waterfall, I got my diving mask to check the depth. The pool was mostly shallow (less than five feet) on the river-right half, but it looked like it got up to about eight feet near where the large log was touching the bottom.
I had seen a picture from SCJack’s blog of someone jumping off the ledge above this spot, but there is only about a six-foot diameter area where you could land safely. I might have attempted it on a warmer day, but plunging into the water on an overcast day like today was not exactly a refreshing experience. Ty finally decided to immerse himself at this point and went under the water. I tried to jump off the rock on the downstream end of the pool and ended up landing where it was not over my head, but I picked my feet up and didn’t jam them on the bottom.
After we hiked back to the road, Ty decided that he was done for the day and headed home, but I still had something else I wanted to check out. The topo map indicated another drop about a mile upstream, and Google Earth depicted white water here. I wasn’t sure if there was any way to get down to the creek in the area without making a gnarly bushwhack, but I knew the Mountains-to-Sea Trail (MST) passed by this area of the creek from above, so I wanted to hike to that point on the MST and assess the situation. The MST met the road only a short distance from the Yellow Fork Falls trailhead. It was in much better shape than the other trail. I actually got to use my new trekking poles on this one (I had tried on the previous trail, but it was so narrow that the poles kept getting caught on vegetation). After about 0.6 miles, the GPS indicated that I was adjacent to the potential waterfall, and I could hear the creek below, but the understory looked too thick to penetrate. I walked a few hundred feet further and noticed a faint path that seemed to be going toward the creek, so I took it. I hung my bathing suit on a tree branch so that people would know where to look for me in the event that I disappeared. The pseudo-path gave out after meeting a pile of deadfall, so I just had to push my way through the vegetation at that point. The understory became less dense when I got close to the creek, and I was able to get down fairly easily. I saw a piece of pink flagging tape as I approached the area of interest. The waterfall ended up being pretty underwhelming. It was about a 10-12 foot cascade into a pool about four feet deep.
The creek then flowed under a jam of logs and sticks (it looked almost like a beaver dam) and dropped about another six feet beneath a rock overhang and into another shallow pool.
The whole setup was similar to Yellow Fork Falls, but smaller and less interesting. It definitely was not worth the effort, but at least I could leave with my curiosity satisfied. Getting down had been a moderate annoyance, but not too bad as far as bushwhacks go. Getting back up, on the other hand, was pretty brutal. I first attempted to take the easiest looking route through the underbrush, thinking it would take me back to the pseudo-path that had brought me here. I kept hitting dead ends and was getting a little concerned, since it was around 7:30 PM and the sun would be setting soon. Fortunately, I had used my fitness tracker on the way down to the waterfall, so I had a virtual path I could backtrack. I went back down to where the vegetation opened up near the creek and tried to stay on top of the GPS track as best I could. I still ended up plowing through plenty of underbrush and didn’t find the actual path until close to where it branched off the MST. I actually thought I had further to go on the pseudo path, but then I saw my bathing suit on the tree branch and was relieved to discover I was back to the main trail. I was relieved to finally get back to the car, and with daylight to spare. I came back to Morganton and got cleaned up at my motel, and then I went to Sagebrush and had a ribeye and double serving of fries. It didn’t meet my wildest expectations, but screw it, it was food.
In conclusion, Yellow Fork Falls was alright, but it didn’t quite measure up to Devil’s Bathtub. I probably would have enjoyed it more if the weather had been sunnier and about ten degrees warmer. Even though the pool looked a lot like the big pool on Devil’s Fork, the surrounding aesthetic wasn’t quite as nice. The vegetation seemed a lot more, I don’t know the word I’m looking for... scrubby? Devil’s Fork has an abundance of moss and ferns that give it a lush rainforest feel, but the area around Yellow Fork Falls looked overall drier and deader. This is probably because all the hemlocks have been killed off by the hemlock wooly adelgid, leaving behind skeletons of dead trees and piles of deadfall (including the big log in the pool). Kevin Adams says this detracts from the beauty of the waterfall in his opinion, and I would have to agree. Another way in which this falls short of the Devil’s Fork hike is the hike itself. The Devil’s Fork trail is much more intimate with the creek, staying alongside it and crossing it many times. The Yellow Fork Falls trail is pretty high and dry, and it comes nowhere near the creek until the waterfall itself. It’s probably unfair to criticize Yellow Fork Falls based on how it measures up to Devil’s Fork, though. It’s a decent little swimming hole in its own right, and its shortcomings are sort of compensated for by its seclusion, which is something Devil’s Fork no longer has. I would be up for returning to Yellow Fork Falls on a warmer, sunnier day and possibly exploring more of the creek.
