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.

( Click here for the full trip report with pictures and videos )

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.

Steels Creek

This past Saturday, I went back up to the mountains for another swimming hole adventure, destination: Steels Creek. This creek boasts a cool two-tiered waterfall, in which the upper tier consists of a series of kettles in a large sloping rock wall. The creek spills from one kettle to the next until finally dropping into a large pool in a rock chasm (I believe the waterfalls in the area are collectively known as the Falls of Steels Creek; I’m not sure if any of the specific waterfalls have official names, so I’m just going to refer to this one as the ‘kettle waterfall’). The water then washes out of the pool and over the lower tier. About a half-mile upstream from this is another waterfall dubbed “Screaming Right Hand Turn Falls” by a blogger who found it in 2010, so named because the creek slides down a 30-40 foot rock face and is dammed by a large rock slab, creating a 90 degree turn and a narrow rectangular pool at the bottom of the falls. [Update 2016: The third edition of Kevin Adams' North Carolina Waterfalls book, which was published after I wrote this entry, refers to this as Beverly Hillbilly Falls, but Adams also acknowledges the name Screaming Right Hand Turn Falls]. I couldn’t find any information on what lay beyond Screaming Right Hand Turn (SRHT) Falls, but looking at Google Earth, there appeared to be a sliding waterfall feeding into a large pool about 500 feet upstream.



My objectives for my first visit were to swim at the kettle waterfall and check out the mystery pool upstream of SRHT Falls. This has been at the top of my swimming hole list all year, but I had been putting it off because most weekends this summer have had a substantial chance of rain (in the mountains, pretty much anything above a 0% chance is a 100% chance) and/or no one has been available to go with me. Steels Creek sounded a bit treacherous from what I had read, especially when the rocks are slick, so I was waiting for 1) a Saturday 2) with bone-dry weather 3) when I wouldn’t have to go alone. I had been eyeing the forecast for weeks, and it looked like August 1 would finally be the day that satisfied criteria 1 and 2. All of my friends within reasonable proximity either had prior obligations or had things come up at the last minute (as has been the case for the past few weekends), so I knew I was going to have to eliminate #3 if I wanted to go this year, because you don’t get days like this in the mountains very often:



( Click here for the full trip report with pictures and videos )

After the hike was over, I felt like it had been stupid of me to go to the kettle falls alone (okay, I knew it was stupid while I was doing it). On the other hand, I would have felt bad for dragging my friends on this hike, because someone probably would have busted their ass (possibly me, since I wouldn’t have been as meticulous with people around) and/or dropped technology in the water. They also would probably have grown weary of my hour-long bushwhacking/boulder scaling adventure in search of the mystery pool. I didn’t get to see everything the creek has to offer on this trip, so Steels Creek definitely warrants a return visit. My future objectives are to visit the large swimming hole downstream of the lower falls, possibly creek-walk to the base of the lower falls (I hear that can be an ordeal), check out the base of Screaming Right Hand Turn Falls, and play in the Garden Tubs (I am now kicking myself for not doing that when I was right there).

I found blogger SCJack’s write-up of his explorations here helpful in planning my trip. It also contains pictures of the large downstream swimming hole and the lower tier of the falls, which I did not make it to on this visit.