"Cinnamon Creek" & Zigzag Falls
Aug. 25th, 2018 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flyminion
Today I got to finally (partially) knock off something that has been on my to-do list for the past two or three years. After checking out Gragg Prong and Steels Creek in 2015, I got into the habit of scanning creeks and rivers on Google Earth and marking points of interest (POIs) that looked like potential swimming holes or waterfalls. It started with scanning larger creeks with known swimming holes, like Upper Creek and Harper Creek, but I admittedly got a little carried away with it and even started scanning smaller tributaries. I would first check topo maps for areas where creeks dropped significantly over short distances, and then I would scan those drop zones on Google Earth to see if I could see any whitewater. There was one creek in particular that caught my attention, which I will call “Cinnamon Creek” to keep the location a secret (I know this spot is probably too esoteric for most people, but I don’t want to be the first to give up the location on a place that has avoided the internet thus far). Cinnamon Creek drops about 200 feet over less than a quarter mile, and a scan of Google Earth showed a few obvious cascades and one possible swimming hole. These features didn’t look that significant, but I’ve been to quite a few good swimming holes that look like nothing on Google Earth, so I was curious to get down there and check the area out for myself. I had marked three points of interest (POIs) numbered in order from upstream to downstream. POIs 1 and 3 were possible waterfalls at what appeared to be the beginning and end of the drop zone, and POI 2 was a potential swimming hole. The stretch of creek between POIs 2 and 3 was largely hidden by shadows and canopy on Google Earth, so I refer to this area as the “shadow zone”. I had no idea what could be hiding in the shadow zone. I've scoured the internet looking for information on this creek, but I could find literally nothing about it other than the occasional hiking blogger mentioning that they crossed it while hiking on the Mountains-to-Sea trail. Even waterfall guru Kevin Adams makes no mention of it in the latest edition of his North Carolina Waterfalls book, and he lists some pretty obscure spots. It was pretty clear that if I really wanted to know what was there, I was going to have to explore it myself.I kept this excursion on the back-burner for 2016, as I still hadn’t finished checking out all the highlights of the Wilson Creek area at that time. I was hoping to get to it in 2017, but several different stars needed to align for this excursion to happen: I needed 1) a bone-dry day, 2) on a summer weekend, and 3) when a buddy was a available who wouldn’t beat my ass for dragging them on a “creekwhack” (creek walk + bushwhack) that potentially offered no reward. There was one day that met all those criteria during the first weekend of June last year. I foolishly passed it up thinking there would be another opportunity that summer, but there wasn’t. The only person I know within driving distance who would be down for this type of trek is my brother, Brian, who is a pretty hardcore hiker and backpacker (his credentials include hiking the entire Appalachian and Pacific Crest Trails, among others). Our schedules don’t match up most of the time, but he was off this weekend and up for an excursion. As of two days ago, the forecast called for both Saturday and Sunday to be dry, so I planned to do back-to-back swimming hole excursions in the Wilson Creek Area this weekend. Tomorrow (Sunday) has been changed to a 60 percent chance of rain, but today was still supposed to be dry, so I decided today would be the best day to do Cinnamon Creek.
Another place I have been wanting to check out is Zigzag Falls on an unnamed tributary of Steels Creek. It didn’t seem worthy of a special trip, but it is close to the road, so I figured it would make a good tacked-on ending to another excursion. I got close to it in 2016 after I went to Wilson Creek Gorge with my friend Miranda, but she didn’t have any desire to bushwhack to it (or to wait on me to bushwhack to it), so that has been somewhat of a loose end for the past couple of years. Kevin Adams mentions in his book that the upper portion of the waterfall has a pool in it, and Google Earth seems to confirm this, so I was interested to see if the pool could be a swimming hole.
I spent the night in Greensboro last night and drove up to Pineola this morning. Brian met me at the Pineola Inn where I am staying, which is super convenient to most of the swimming holes in the Wilson Creek and Linville Gorge areas. I ate a Jersey Mike’s sub that I had picked up on the way over, and then we headed out to Cinnamon Creek.
We turned off the paved road and drove down the gravel forest service road toward the creek. There is a point where the road parallels the creek from about 300 feet up the hill and is directly adjacent to where the potential waterfalls start. Our options were to try bushwhacking down the hill from this point, or creek-walk half a mile downstream from where the road crosses the creek. We stopped at the top of the hill to see if it looked like there might be a somewhat open path down the hill, but it looked pretty thick all around. We drove down to the area where the creek flows under the road and decided we would just walk all the way down the creek. I had checked this spot out after my trip to Upper Creek last year, and there were a couple of faint trails on both sides of the creek. It looked like the one on the river-left side went further, so we started down it. I had worn my hiking boots at first with my Vibram toe shoes strapped to my backpack in case I needed them, but we only got about 50 feet into the woods before the faint path gave way to a thicket of rhododendrons, and it became obvious that trying to keep our feet dry was going to be futile. I ran back to put my boots in the car, and then we got into the creek and walked downstream. We got started probably around 2:15 PM.
The creek was annoying at first because it was small and had quite a few limbs and branches growing across it, but it opened up a bit after receiving a few small tributary streams.
The water was mostly knee-deep or shallower, so it was easier than creek-walking a larger creek like Upper Creek. About a quarter mile downstream, we encountered our first obstacle.
This was about a 10-foot cascade that went through a tight squeeze between the rocks, so we had to get out of the water and bushwhack around it. It was fairly easy (minus the thickness of the rhododendrons) to bypass on the river-right side.
We continued downstream about another quarter mile until we reached a broad, shallow pool.
It was mostly shallow but looked like it could be 3-4 feet deep in places. I knew from Google Earth that this pool was directly upstream of the waterfall area, and we could see a drop on the horizon.
When we got to the drop, it looked pretty significant (probably about 15 feet). I thought this must be POI 1. However, I could tell from Google Earth that POI 1 had a rock overhanging the brink of the waterfall on the river-left side, and this one had a rock on the river-right.
We weren’t exactly sure how to get down. Brian asked if we had reached an impasse. My response: "Nah." It looked like scooting straight down the dry portion of the rock in the middle of the waterfall might work, as the rest of the waterfall from that point down had plenty of texture and contours to walk on.
However, Brian decided to cross the creek at the top and squeeze under a ledge to get into the woods on the river left.
This area was slippery, and I thought it seemed just as sketchy if not sketchier than going down the middle would have been. We bushwhacked our way back down to the creek about 50 feet downstream of the waterfall, and we backtracked upstream to get a good view from the base.
There was a sliding cascade where we had re-entered the creek from the woods.
We bypassed about half of the slide on the river-left, which was cluttered with deadfall, and then we walked out on a log and used it to steady ourselves as we stepped over the rushing water to the other side. We went down the rest of the way on the river-right.
The next drop ended up being the real POI 1. Here is what it looks like on Google Earth:
It looked like a moderate-grade slide on the aerial imagery, but it was steeper in real life:
On this one, it looked like the only way down was to scoot directly down the steep rock face. We were considering getting out a rope, because we didn’t know if we would be able to get back up. I told Brian to wait at the top, and I would scoot down and try to come back up to see if it was doable. If not, he could throw a rope. I ended up being able to get back up unassisted, so we both went down without using a rope.
The waterfall had three streams of water: two of them curved steeply down the face of the rock we had just descended, and the majority of the flow snaked around it on the river-left.
The creek then flowed over a less steep rock platform into a broad pool that was probably about three feet deep. The majority of the flow slides down a chute behind the rock platform, which isn't really visible in the pictures but can be seen in the video.
POI 2 (the potential swimming hole) was just past this pool. Here is what it looks like on Google Earth:
It was a lot closer to POI 1 than it looked on Google Earth, but there was a slightly gnarly cascade between us and the pool. We checked both sides of the creek to see if there was a way to bypass it. There wasn’t, which meant we would have to descend the cascade. I can’t remember exactly what we did, but I think we used the log at the top to climb down to the rock face just below the brink of the cascade, and we worked our way down the river-left side of the rock at the edge of the tree line before crossing the cascade near the bottom.
I entered the pool in my bathing suit without my backpack on to see how deep it was, but it wasn’t over waist-deep along the edge. This pool was the one I had the highest hopes for, but it didn’t really look deep enough to be a swimming hole.
After POI 2 was the “shadow zone”, so I wasn’t sure what surprises (good or bad) could be hidden here. There was about a 15-foot waterfall spilling out of POI 2. This waterfall actually had a decent plunge pool that looked like it could be a legit swimming hole. We bypassed the drop-off by bushwhacking through the woods down the river-left side and climbed up onto a boulder on the downstream end of the plunge pool.
I could see why this area was in the shadow zone in the aerial imagery. The contrast of the sunlight and shadows made it impossible to take good pictures here (the one of the boulder in the pool was with HDR on, and post-processing to turn down the highlights as much as possible).
Looking downstream, it looked like we had reached a pinch point in the gorge, and that the creek was impassable beyond this point. The woods on the river-left side were too steep to proceed any further without swinging really, really wide, and the river-right side was a steep rock cliff.
Getting down to the creek bank from here without swimming would involve jumping off the boulder to the next rock slab eight feet below at the downstream edge of the pool, and just beyond that point was a narrow sluice cascade with vertical drops that we obviously couldn’t walk through.
I decided I would get into the water to see how deep it was. On the upstream side of the boulder, I was able to work my way down into the creek. It was so cold it was almost painful to get in. I tried to check the depth with my diving mask, but it kept fogging up and making it difficult to see. I quickly swam around to the downstream end of the boulder (to the point where I said you would have to jump eight feet down if you wanted to get there without getting wet), and I got a closer look at the sluice cascade.
There was definitely no way down this one. However, now that I was up close, I could see that the massive rock slab damming the pool was actually an island, and the creek went around both sides of it. The sluice was only the river-left portion of the cascade; a small part of the flow also exited the pool through a slot on the river right side.
I was able to walk through the slot, and this area was more open and stair-steppy. It looked like I could make it down, but Brian couldn’t follow because he didn’t want to get into the water, and there was no way to safely make it to where I was without swimming. I decided to take a shot at descending the cascade, since it seemed like we were so close to making it all the way to the bottom (POI 3). Although POI 3 wasn't my top priority from a swimming hole perspective, it looked like it had potential to be the best of the cascades, as it looked like the creek shot over the side of a steep drop-off and took a vertical plunge.
Since I had come this far, I decided to just scoot down this cascade to see if I could see to the end of the shadow zone (which didn’t look very shadowy at this time of day). I told Brian if I wasn’t back in 7 minutes to come looking for me. I started down the cascade, and it looked doable, but it was also kind of slick. At the bottom was a broad, flat-ish area that looked easy to navigate, and what looked like another possible drop downstream. I was pretty sure I could make it down okay, but if I did get hurt, it would mean Brian would have to swim, also climb down this cascade, and then go for help without getting hurt himself (it had taken nearly two hours to get to this point from the road). And the idea of a rescue in this area seemed extremely difficult (you would probably have to be plucked out by a helicopter). So, even though I thought I could make it, I decided I shouldn’t be doing this out of sight of anyone, so I chose not to continue. This is a Google Earth view of the waterfall area starting with the first cascade (the one that I initially thought was POI 1), and the red flag is approximately where I was when I decided to turn back:
On one hand, it looked like I was so close. On the other hand, "close" in this terrain depends more on the number of obstacles than the distance per se, so there's no telling what else I may have encountered. I climbed back up to the swimming hole where Brian was waiting on top of the boulder. It was past 4:30 anyway, so it seemed like we should probably start heading back to leave ourselves enough daylight. When I swam back through the pool, I took another shot at trying to see the bottom. I was able to see it through my fogged mask, and it looked like it was about three feet below the bottoms of my feet, which would make the water 8-9 feet deep. I thought about jumping off the rock (it was only about 4-5 feet above the water), but I thought again of the difficulty of a rescue in this area should something go wrong, so I decided not to jump. When we got back to POI 2, I checked the depth, and it looked about 5 feet deep at the deepest point. I took the temperature here, and the water was 60 °F (about like Devil’s Bathtub).
Going back up the creek was faster than going down, probably because we now knew how to navigate all the cascades we had encountered up to this point. When we reached the first major cascade, we went up the middle this time instead of crawling under the overhanging rock, which ended up being an easier route. I asked if Brian wanted to try bushwhacking straight up the hill to the road, and then walking back down the road to the car, but he said it was probably better to stick with the devil we know, so we went back the way we came. We did another 45 minutes of creek-walking upstream back to the road. We tried to go around the first obstacle we had encountered on the river-left side this time, but it ended up being more of a bushwhack, so river-right ended up being the better way of bypassing that cascade. We got back to the car around 6 PM.
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I still wanted to check out the top of Zigzag Falls since we had a little daylight left, so we drove to it. There didn’t seem to be a direct path down to the top of the falls through the woods, so we parked where the creek went under the road and creek-walked downstream. It took us about 15-20 minutes to get to the top of the falls.
We scooted down the rock where the first drop emptied into a small pool (the potential swimming hole).
We checked out the view of the rest of the waterfall, but we couldn’t see beyond the point where it zigzagged because the rock slab it curved around blocked the rest of the view from where we were standing.
Kevin Adams has a photo on his website presumably taken from the knife-edge rock where the creek curves out of view in my picture, but it doesn’t show the rest of the waterfall. Hiking vlogger Zachary Robbins also has a video from roughly the same vantage point (skip to 17:15) where he gets an obscured view of the bottom through the leaves. Brian and I saw something blue floating in the creek at the very bottom of the falls. We joked that it could be a body, but we looked through binoculars and could tell it was just some type of blue material (we couldn’t figure out exactly what it was). You can sort of see it when I zoom in in the video:
I wasn’t going to get into the pool, as it didn’t look that deep, but then I changed my mind for the sake of completion. It ended up being shoulder-deep at its deepest point. I thought it was even colder than Cinnamon Creek, but it ended up being 61 °F, so it was about the same.
We returned to the car at this point, and we quenched our appetites with some pizza from Italian Pizza and Pasta, which is next door to the Pineola Inn.
In summary, we saw some pretty cool stuff today. I would have thought Cinnamon Creek was kind of "meh" had it been along an established hiking trail with other people around, but the secret hideout feel and the fact that there was literally no trace of anyone ever having been there made it a fun adventure. We didn't find anything major, but I do enjoy a good creek walk, and it’s nice when there are at least some cascades or swimming holes to make things interesting. I would say it was nice to have finally satisfied my curiosity for Cinnamon Creek, since I explored the area I was most curious about and actually found a pool that I would say could pass for a legit swimming hole (although it was not the pool I had initially thought would be the swimming hole). However, it feels incomplete since I didn’t make it all the way to the bottom of the waterfall area. We probably could have done it if we had gotten started an hour or two earlier. Not getting to the bottom is going to be a loose end for me. It seemed so attainable, but better safe than sorry, I guess. Each time we descended a cascade, we were potentially getting ourselves into deeper and deeper shit from a getting-help/rescue standpoint should something go wrong, and the thought of that became too much after we were four cascades deep with only a couple of hours of daylight left. I am curious to see the rest of the waterfall area, but I would want a group of at least four people next time, and I’m not sure I could round up enough people who are both willing and able to complete this trek (I would probably lose even the most adventurous people I know at the part that requires swimming through a deep pool of 60 degree water). Perhaps Team Waterfall will see this and pick up where I left off. I might be content seeing pictures of what I missed, but the completionist in me wants to get back out there and finish what I started. As far as Zigzag Falls, I would say curiosity satisfied. The potential swimming hole didn’t end up being anything terribly interesting, and the waterfall was cool from what we saw, but I don’t feel the need to get more vantage points of it.
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Update: We returned to Cinnamon Creek in 2020 and checked out the remaining points of interest. Click here for Part 2 of our Cinnamon Creek explorations.
