Horsepasture River

For day 3 of our southeastern swimming hole bonanza, Cade and I went to the Horsepasture River near Sapphire, NC. We called Tallulah Gorge, and they were not issuing gorge floor permits today, and I was getting tired of lackluster swimming holes, so I picked a place I knew would deliver. I had been to some of the Horsepasture River waterfalls on a family waterfall vacation when I was 11 years old, and even at that age, I was getting bored with 25-foot waterfalls and wanted to see something excessively large. Rainbow Falls on the Horsepasture River was the waterfall that had finally impressed me, and I also remembered that Turtleback Falls and Drift Falls upstream had good swimming holes (even though I was not yet into swimming holes at that age). There are also several more waterfalls downstream of Rainbow Falls that I have never seen before, including Hidden Falls and Stairway Falls.

My last visit was back in 1997 when the National Forest Service owned the land along the entire stretch of river from the road to Drift Falls, and you parked along the road and hiked in from upstream. Now, the land Drift Falls is on is privately owned, so accessing the area involves parking in Gorges State Park (which did not exist back in 1997) and taking a longer trail to the river. The land along the river (sans Drift Falls) is Pisgah (formerly Nantahala) National Forest rather than the state park.

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

In summary, the Horsepasture River is probably a paradise of killer swimming holes on sunny days when the flow is down, but today the swimming holes looked killer in a different way. On the bright side, the waterfalls (especially Rainbow Falls) were pretty impressive at high flow. If I’m ever back in the area during more ideal conditions, I would like to return to all of the places we visited today (sans Hidden Falls) and also check out Sidepocket Falls.

Stay tuned to see if Cade and I will FINALLY get to go to Tallulah Gorge (the main purpose of our trip) tomorrow.
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Update: I returned to the Horsepasture River in 2022 to give it a proper exploration. Click here for that entry.