Linville Gorge - Cathedral
Sep. 8th, 2019 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flyminion
Today, Brian and I went down into Linville Gorge to check out the swimming hole situation on a section of the river that the boating community refer to as Cathedral Gorge. According to American Whitewater, Cathedral Gorge stretches from the Spence Ridge Trail crossing to a small waterfall that spills into a large swimming hole. Checking out this stretch of the river has been on my back burner for the past two years, but I recently saw a youtube video featuring Linville Gorge swimming holes (one of which was the aforementioned Cathedral Gorge swimming hole), which inspired me to bump it up on my to-do list. My first trip down into the gorge two years ago was to check out Babel Tower Falls, a sliding rapid with a swimming hole. While the scenery was impressive, I thought the swimming hole was just so/so. The section of the gorge on today’s agenda was what I had originally wanted to do on my previous trip, but taking the Spence Ridge Trail requires crossing the river, so I wanted to do a hike that didn’t require a river crossing for my first trip in case the river was too rough to ford. It was crossable in most areas near Babel Tower Falls, which gave me the green light to use the Spence Ridge Trail to access the gorge. One thing I noted from my Babel Tower Falls excursion was that the water seemed a little rough and murky (the gage height was 1.01 feet that day), so I was looking for days with slightly lower water levels for future Linville Gorge swimming hole excursions. Looking at the past gage data, it looked like 0.9 feet was a typical summer flow, at least until 2017. It seems like the summers have been exceptionally wet, even for the mountains, since 2017, which meant that summer gage heights below 1.00 feet have been the exception rather than the rule in recent years. The river never got below 1.00 feet last summer, and it didn’t happen for the first time this summer until a week or two ago.Just to avoid confusion before we get started, there are two waterfalls in Cathedral Gorge that people refer to as "Cathedral Falls". One is a high waterfall that spills into the river from a small unnamed tributary stream, and the other is the aforementioned small waterfall (which is a class V rapid in high water) on the Linville River that the boating community refers to as Cathedral Falls or just Cathedral (all rapid names I use in this entry are according to A Wet State and American Whitewater's listing for the Linville River). For the purposes of this trip report, “Cathedral Falls” is the high tributary waterfall, and “Cathedral” is the rapid/small waterfall and its plunge pool on the Linville River. Cathedral Falls did not appear to drop into the river near any swimming holes, from what I could see in pictures of it. The Cathedral rapid, on the other hand, appeared to have a fairly large swimming hole with multiple jumping opportunities, so that was our main point of interest for today.
Brian had stayed the night after yesterday’s excursion, and I still wasn’t sure what we were going to do today. We still need to finish “Cinnamon Creek”, but after yesterday’s excursion at upper Wilson Creek, I figured there wouldn’t be much water going over the waterfalls since Cinnamon Creek is a smaller creek. I have also been meaning to explore the section of Upper Creek between the Mountains-to-Sea Trail crossing and Upper Creek Falls, but that would be one hell of a creek walk, and I did not come prepared for it. I had kind of wanted to save Cathedral for a time when I really needed a sweet new swimming hole, but I figured it made the most sense to take advantage of the low water levels on the Linville River while we had the chance.
After clearing out of our motel room and getting a breakfast sub at Subway in Newland, Brian and I drove down Table Rock Road to the Spence Ridge Trailhead. Brian had suggested parking one car at the Conley Cove Trailhead on the opposite side of the gorge and doing a rim-to-rim hike, but that would have added an extra two hours to the excursion, given that it would take about an hour to drive from one trailhead to the other, and we would have to do it twice. I was expecting any trail to the gorge floor to be steep and strenuous, but the Spence Ridge Trail was fairly tame. I was waiting on there to be a perilously steep descent somewhere, but then we just came out at the river’s edge. The remains of an old bridge that had been washed away in a flood a few years ago were there. The first third of the bridge looked relatively intact, but all that remained of the rest were the stone bases. There was a pretty enticing swimming hole here, but this was not the main attraction, so we continued onward, even though I was getting pretty hot.
It was only 70 °F up at the rim, but it was probably in the 80’s at the gorge floor, and with no clouds in the sky.
I was able to rockhop across the river at the former Spence Ridge bridge site without getting my feet wet. The Linville Gorge Trail runs along the river-right side of the river, so we followed it a short distance downstream. The trail was probably about fifty feet above the river when we reached the point where we could see Cathedral Falls through the trees, and there was a scramble trail down to a campsite across the river from it. It was around noon at this point, and the sun was sort of behind the waterfall, so I decided we would stop by here on the way back, when the lighting would probably be better.
After passing Cathedral Falls, we couldn’t really see the river through the foliage, so it was hard to tell if we were bypassing anything interesting. We continued maybe a quarter mile down the trail until we could see glimpses of Cathedral and its swimming hole through the trees. We had to go a couple hundred feet downstream of the swimming hole before we found a scramble trail down to the river’s edge beneath an enormous boulder. We boulder-hopped and scrambled over piles of driftwood apparently deposited in a past flood. We saw some obviously manmade boards among the rubble and wondered if they were from the Spence Ridge Trail bridge.
The swimming hole was a large pool fed by the Cathedral rapid, which at today’s flow was a small waterfall about eight feet high.
The pool was lined by cliffs and sloping rocks on the river-left, and it had a large boulder on the river-right that offered a jump of about ten feet. It also looked like you could jump from the rock face that the waterfall spilled over, if the water was deep enough.
There was a ledge just across from where the waterfall spilled in that offered a jump of about 15 feet, but it looked like accessing the ledge would be too sketchy. Also, you would have to land close to the waterfall boil, and we weren’t sure if there was a strong current or undercut rocks.
Finally, on the downstream end of the pool, there was a jump of about six feet (where Brian is standing in the picture):
Brian climbed up and did the small downstream jump before I had an opportunity to depth check, but he didn’t hit the bottom.
When I got changed into my watershoes, I snorkeled that area first, and it was about eight feet deep. The water temperature was 71 °F. The water was clear enough to see about eight to ten feet down. In areas that were deeper than that, I had to dive down a few feet to see the bottom. The section under the large boulder was about twelve feet deep. There were shallow rocks on both sides of the deep area, but they were easily visible from above the water. The area under the rock face that the waterfall spilled over was about eight to ten feet deep, with fissures and crevices in the rocky bottom that dropped down to maybe about fifteen feet. I didn’t snorkel too close to the waterfall, as I was worried about the current, and I figured the bubbles would make it difficult to see anything.
After I had depth checked, we jumped from the large boulder a few times.
We then did some low jumps from a rock on the opposite side of the pool, where the river turned the corner after the waterfall.
I tried to go into the water near the waterfall while holding onto a stick that Brian was holding the other end of. I felt around for undercut rocks with my foot and looked under the water, but the bubbles made it hard to see much. The current seemed to only be strong at the surface, but I was still too scared to swim down. It looked like we wouldn’t be jumping off the high ledge. I climbed up the rock face adjacent to the ledge, and it looked like you could jump from there also, but you would have to jump out to clear some stuff, and you would probably land right in the waterfall boil.
It looked like you might be able to climb directly up to the ledge (right below the overhanging stick in the photo) from below, but you would probably need a rope. After I finished checking this out, I climbed onto the rock face next to the waterfall and jumped from there (photo by Brian):
It was a foot or two lower than the large boulder jump we had done earlier. Brian wanted to do this after seeing me do it, so we went back up and bouldered a short distance upstream first. We didn’t see anything noteworthy, so we came back down to Cathedral and jumped.
The swimming hole started losing sunlight around 3:00 PM, so we got a few final jumps in. Here is a video of the jumps we recorded:
We headed upstream to check out Cathedral Falls, stopping to let a rattlesnake slither across the trail along the way. We took a scramble trail down to what looked like a possible swimming hole at the base of a rapid called Ribshot below Cathedral Falls.
The Ribshot pool was deep in a few spots, but it had too many scattered shallow areas for jumping to be possible here, which was a shame, since it had several cliffs and ledges above it.
Cathedral Falls was a 30-40 foot waterfall, but it was basically just a trickle at today’s flow.
Kevin Adams says in the third edition of his North Carolina Waterfalls book that there is more to the waterfall than can be seen from the base, so I crossed the river and tried to climb up it as Brian explored just upstream. I got about halfway up the waterfall, which was not too difficult since it was mossy and stair-steppy, but I reached a point where I would have had to rock-climb to continue, so I went back down to the river and climbed upstream past the next rapid (called Blind as a Bat) to see if Brian had found anything. A man had come down the scramble trail and had tried to ask me something from across the river while I was climbing the waterfall. I couldn’t hear him, so I climbed up onto a boulder to see what he wanted when I was back on his side of the river. He wanted to know if we were camping there, as he was looking to claim the campsite at the base of the scramble trail, and I said we weren't. Brian said there was a “lazy river” through here where you could ride the current about 50 feet downstream. We both tried it, and I got out when it seemed like the current was pushing us toward the rock wall that dammed the pool, because there was no obvious outlet, but that current had to be leading somewhere. When we climbed back down to the other side of the rock, we could see water coming out from under it, meaning that the current we were riding probably went beneath the rock. It probably would have been good to know that beforehand. I guess that’s why they call it Blind as a Bat.
From here, we headed back to the Spence Ridge Trail swimming hole, which was now less crowded and had lost all sunlight.
There was a family of three there, and one of them told me that there was a ledge you could jump from. I assumed he meant the rock on the upstream end of the pool. I snorkeled it, and it was pretty deep on the downstream end (probably 12-15 feet), but the upstream end next to the would-be jumping spots was not deep enough to be over my head in most areas. We climbed up on some boulders just upstream of the pool to see if there were any other good pools immediately upstream, but we didn’t spot anything interesting. We swam around some more and jumped off a low jump of maybe four feet on the downstream end of the pool, which still required some aiming to miss shallow rocks. After we were cooled off, we got out of the water and prepared to head out. I tried to get a picture of Brian looking like he was perilously hanging high above the ground...
We hiked back up the Spence Ridge Trail and parted ways at this point, as I was going toward Morganton on my way back to Greensboro, and Brian was heading back to Abingdon.
After a 2.5 hour drive back to Greensboro, I went to Texas Roadhouse with my stepmom and sister, and I got a ribeye with a large margarita.
In summary, I was much more pleased with today’s Linville Gorge excursion than with the Babel Tower swimming hole in 2017. I would say the Cathedral swimming hole is the best swimming hole I have found so far in the Linville Gorge and Wilson Creek areas, and it’s actually one of the best swimming holes I have been to this summer, including the ones from California and Tennessee. As much as I like the swimming holes in the Wilson Creek area, there aren’t really any with non-sketchy jumping opportunities, so it was nice to finally find one with serviceable jumps. The water was a bit sudsy, as had been the case at Babel Tower Falls, but the clarity here was good enough to see the bottom in most areas to scope out jumping spots. I guess the only downside to this area is that you have to be opportunistic with the water levels, given that the Linville River is a larger waterway than most of the Wilson Creek area creeks. The Spence Ridge Trail swimming hole was also a legit swimming hole and a good place to cool off, but I probably wouldn’t hike all the way into the gorge just for that particular spot. Although it is large and deep, there aren’t really any noteworthy jumping opportunities, and it seems to get a lot of traffic, since it is at a trail junction. I guess it serves the function of deterring people from checking out other, more difficult-to-access swimming holes, so I’m certainly not complaining about its existence.
I thought this weekend was going to get me super burnt out on swimming holes, since I was really hoping to just relax at home after all the traveling I’ve done in the past month, but Cathedral did just the opposite and rejuvenated my appetite for more swimming holes right at the end of the summer. The mountains generally get too chilly for swimming to be enjoyable after the first or second week of September, so that’s probably all for this year, but I’m definitely interested to get back into the gorge and see if I can find another swimming hole on the level of Cathedral.
