Tallulah Gorge

Today, Cade and I finally got to go to Tallulah Gorge State Park, which was the purpose of our weeklong trip to the area. I had gotten the idea to come here after seeing the gorge in the movie Deliverance. Incidentally, this was my second trek to a swimming hole featured in a movie with a rape scene (the first being Krause Springs from the movie Teeth). Is that weird? Anyway, I remember seeing the scenes in Deliverance where the protagonists unwittingly go over a sliding waterfall in a canoe, and then Jon Voight climbs the gorge wall above the pool to confront the hillbilly who is trying to snipe them from the top of the gorge. I thought that it looked like a spectacular swimming hole, but as a teenager, I was unaware of the magic of the “filming locations” section on IMDb, so I had no idea where the swimming hole was. Some time later, I was browsing swimmingholes.org and came across the listing for Tallulah Gorge, and I thought it looked a lot like the gorge from Deliverance. The text for the listing confirmed this. I wasn’t quite as adventurous in my teens and early twenties (and also didn’t really have the resources to travel), so I never visited the gorge, even though it was on my radar. Now that I have an income and paid time off, Tallulah Gorge has climbed higher up on my to-do list. Cade and I had planned to go last year, but we got rained out, so we changed plans and went to some Florida springs instead. Cade had some vacation time to burn this summer, so we decided to come to north Georgia for a week to give Tallulah Gorge another shot, and also check out other swimming holes in Georgia and the Carolinas.

Tallulah Gorge State Park is pretty stringent about issuing gorge floor permits, and they won’t do it when the rocks are wet or when there is a sufficient chance of rain. The weather had been uncooperative thus far, and today (day 4 of our trip) was the only day in the foreseeable future with less than a 60 % chance of rain. Even so, it had rained the night before and there was a 20% chance of rain today, so it was still pretty iffy. I was pretty anxious about it, because if they didn’t issue permits today, then it meant that we had come here for nothing, since everything up to this point had been lackluster (although that was due to the weather/water level rather than the quality of the swimming holes in yesterday’s case). To make things even more challenging, today was a Saturday, and I had read that so many people line up outside the park that gorge floor permits (limited to 100 visitors per day) effectively run out before the park even opens at 8 AM. I insisted that we get there at 7 AM just to be safe, because I did not drive five hours from Raleigh and burn a week of vacation leave to get screwed out of a gorge floor permit. When we got there, there were already people walking up to the gate from the campground, and there were about ten people already at the gate. At first we thought you weren’t allowed to block the road, so Cade parked the car while I secured a spot in line. However, I saw that people were starting to line up in their cars behind the gate, and I knew all they had to do was zoom past the pedestrians, so we ran back and got the car. There were already about ten cars in front of us by the time we got back at around 7:15. They opened the gate around 7:40, and we drove in and lined up outside the visitor center while we waited for the rangers to decide if they would open the gorge floor. One of the rangers or attendants came out and took a head count, so we figured that was a good sign. At 8:01 AM, they opened the doors and we filed inside. One of the rangers took about 50 of us into a classroom and explained the rules and the route through the gorge (there is no official trail along the floor). She said that it was more like climbing and bouldering than hiking, and that most people say that it’s the most difficult hike of their lives (then again, most people don’t do the things we would do to get to swimming holes). We then filled out our permits, and Cade and I left to get breakfast. We returned a little after 10 AM and started on the North Rim Trail behind the visitor center.

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

In conclusion, Bridal Veil Falls in Tallulah Gorge is one of the best swimming holes I have been to. I don't know if I would say it's the best (Upper Creek Falls and Harper Creek Falls are also strong contenders), but it's easily top-five material. It definitely has that natural waterpark feel to it, and the scenery is gorgeous. Get it gorgeous? Forgive me if I already used that pun somewhere else. Anyway, after today, I feel fulfilled and that the entire trip was worthwhile, regardless of how the prior and upcoming swimming holes turned/will turn out.