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flyminion
Last year, my brother Brian and I hiked the Wilson Creek Trail along an upper section of Wilson Creek upstream from the more popular Wilson Creek Gorge. Before that hike, I had scanned the creek on Google Earth and marked 13 points of interest (POIs) that looked like potential swimming holes. We got to the first ten POIs on the previous hike, but the trail left the creek and headed back up to the road between POIs 10 and 11, meaning that POIs 11-13 would require a creek walk. It was already late by the time we had reached this point in the trail, so we decided we didn’t have time for POIs 11-13 on that trip. There were several weekends with nice weather this summer that I wanted to try and wrap this up, but Brian usually had other plans.After swimming-holing the hell out of August with back-to-back trips to Tennessee and California, I was really looking forward to just chillaxing at home and doing absolutely nothing this weekend. I haven’t had a full day of downtime since the beginning of August, and I’ve been exhausted all of this past week, probably due to jet lag from returning from California. However, the weather in the North Carolina mountains was supposed to be warm and sunny all weekend, followed by an extended period of rain, so I figured I could squeeze in one last weekend of swimming hole action before fall arrives and I go into hibernation. Brian was free this weekend, so we decided to knock out the rest of the Wilson Creek Trail today.
I left from Greensboro around 10 AM. After I contended with Saturday traffic in Boone, we met up at the Pineola Inn around 1:30 PM. My room was in a different building (above the office) rather than the main inn. It was a little older and in need of TLC. I had last seen Brian a month ago when he had to bail halfway down the Cable Trail to Cane Creek Falls in Tennessee so that he and his girlfriend could get back to Virginia in time to get their dog out of boarding. He said it was good they left when they did, because they barely made it back in time.
Back in the present, after I ate my Jersey Mike’s sub that I had picked up in Boone, we drove out to Edgemont Road and turned down the Forest Service road where the northern trailhead for the Wilson Creek Trail is located. We went down the trail and picked up right where we left off last year, at the Emerald Pool (photos and video from last year):
I didn’t want to change into my swimsuit right away because I wanted to keep my phone in my pants pocket (my only swimsuit with good pockets was the one I destroyed at Rock Creek in California a couple of weeks ago). I put on my diving mask and looked into the water without getting in past my knees, and it appeared to be 5-6 feet deep at the deepest point. There was also a pool in the cascade just above the Emerald Pool that we had tried to depth-check with a stick last year without finding the bottom.
I bypassed this area because Brian had already disappeared up the creek. We passed a few small pools, but nothing major. I didn’t check the GPS because I thought we had a while to go before we would get to POI 11.
The creek was pretty uneventful above the Emerald Pool area.
We came to a small pool that looked like it might be deep enough to be over my head. This was not one of my marked POIs, but I will call it POI 12.5 (because, as I was about to find out, we had unknowingly bypassed POIs 11 and 12 and were now between POIs 12 and 13).
I decided I would strip to my swimsuit and see how deep this one was. I believe it was between 5-6 feet deep. I guessed that the water temperature was about 66.5 °F before getting in, but it was actually 64 °F. Brian got in as well, and he is pretty vocal when he gets into cold water. There was another small cascade and pool directly above this one.
Just beyond this area, we saw another spot that didn’t look deep enough to be worth getting into.
Just above this spot, the creek split in two directions. I knew POI 13 was just downstream of the confluence of Wilson Creek and Little Wilson Creek, and I knew of no other significant confluences between the Emerald Pool and POI 13, so I checked the GPS to see where we were. It said we were at POI 13 (which was the spot I didn’t think was worth getting into). Since it had only taken us 20 minutes, if that, to get here from the Emerald Pool, I decided to backtrack so I could figure out where POIs 11 and 12 were, and check out the Emerald Pool and the small pool in the cascade just above it.
POI 12 was a very small pool, so I’m not sure why it stood out on Google Earth.
It was only about waist deep. I think we had bypassed it on the way in by going through a dry part of the creek bed.
POI 11 was also not a significant pool, but I guess it stood out on Google Earth because it was relatively broad despite being shallow.
I think this one was maybe chest deep.
I then went back down to the Emerald Pool to give it a proper checking-out. It was about 6.5 feet deep at its deepest point, just barely over my head. Brian decided to take a dip here as well. The pool in the cascade just above the Emerald Pool was about chest deep.
Since this excursion had been a little underwhelming thus far, we decided to creek-walk back to the road, since the creek was pretty easy to walk, especially since it looked drier than last year. At the confluence of the two creeks above POI 13, we took Little Wilson Creek, since it would come out closer to the car. It was pretty easy to walk, but the rocks were a little more slippery than downstream of the confluence. Little Wilson was a small cobblestone stream in this area with nothing terribly interesting. As we neared the road, we found a couple of small cascades and pools.
The bottom pool was small in diameter but about chest deep.
Still underwhelmed when we got back to the road, we decided to continue up Little Wilson Creek to Edgemont Road. I knew there was a big sliding waterfall on this section since I had creek-walked a portion of Little Wilson Creek last year. We walked through the large culvert under the road and continued upstream.
This was about as interesting as it got:
After this section, we could see the bottom of the waterfall just ahead (photo re-used from last year):
Brian took what is probably the most unflattering picture of me this year in one of the small tubs near the bottom of the falls:
When we got to the small pool near the base of the long slide, I could see that the falls were drier than in May of last year, and the fallen tree was no longer lying across the bottom (photos re-used from last year, with higher flow and the tree lying across):
It was pretty easy to walk all the way up the rock face, whereas last year I had to detour through the woods in some places because it was too wet and slippery. We were looking at the little tubs in the falls and joking about how we could make travel advertisements trying to oversell the serenity of the area. From the top of the falls, we took the short trail back to the road and walked about a mile back down to where we had left the car.
On the way out, we stopped near where regular Wilson Creek goes under Edgemont Road. We walked downstream along the road as the creek dropped further and further below it. We tried at several points to get a view of the creek below, but there was too much foliage. At one point, we could tell we were on the edge of a high cliff. We walked back up the road and took a scramble trail covered with loose gravel down to the creek for a little preview, to see if this section of Wilson Creek might also be worth creek walking. There were some sliding cascades with small pools similar to what I had seen on the upper section of Little Wilson Creek last year, and the creek was hemmed by some pretty significant cliffs. We decided this would probably be worth creek-walking sometime.
We went back up to the road, and I washed out my Vibram toe shoes under the bridge and changed back into my hiking boots. We then drove into Newland and had some mediocre pizza at the River Walk Pizza. I also ate an entire order of cinnamon sticks (minus one stick) that was larger than my actual pizza.
In summary, this excursion did nothing to change my mind that the highlights of the Wilson Creek Trail are on the downstream end, even though the new stuff we saw today technically wasn’t along the trail. We didn’t find any legit swimming holes that we had not already seen on last year’s hike, but it was a decent and fairly easy creek walk, and it was nice to satisfy my lingering curiosities from last year. We might make it a point to creek-walk the upper section of Wilson Creek between the Forest Road and Edgemont Road, but that will probably be more for a time when I just want to do something outdoorsy and am not itching to go swimming, as I would not expect to find any legit swimming holes there.
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Date: 2019-12-04 03:05 am (UTC)