Yellow Fork Falls

It was sunny in the mountains last Saturday, and I felt guilty for passing up the opportunity to take advantage of that, so I decided to do back-to-back swimming hole treks this weekend to make up for it since the forecast looked pretty rain-free. Today I went to Yellow Fork Falls, which is on the opposite side of Linville Gorge from the Wilson Creek area. This is the first Kevin Adams inspired swimming hole trek that I have done, as I would probably have never discovered this one without his North Carolina Waterfalls book. I was able to find a couple of blogs about it after doing an internet search, but it seems to mostly be under the radar. This one was currently at the top of my swimming hole hit list in the Boone/Morganton area because the clear blue swimming hole looked similar to the one at Devil’s Bathtub, which has recently become overrun with tourists after going viral on social media. I was hopeful that Yellow Fork could become my surrogate Devil’s Fork.

Although the hike is fairly short (1.1 miles, according to my fitness tracker), I didn’t want to solo this particular location because it is pretty secluded, and the trailhead is, as Kevin Adams puts it, nondescript. My friend Ty had recently moved to Asheville and was up for checking out some of the waterfalls in the area, so we met up at a gas station along I-40 and drove out into the middle of nowhere. I caught a glimpse of the mouth of Linville Gorge as the paved road gave way to gravel. I had the trailhead marked in my GPS (coordinates courtesy of Kevin Adams’ book), which was fortunate, as the trailhead is indeed nondescript. We walked along the road and had trouble finding it even with the GPS. We finally just went into the woods at an area that didn’t look too thick, and we noticed the trail to our left. We probably would have found the trailhead if we had gone ten feet further down the road. The trail was worn, but it was also narrow and not pruned. It was not very steep until we got near the creek, and we even had to climb down a wooden ladder as we neared the waterfall.

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

In conclusion, Yellow Fork Falls was alright, but it didn’t quite measure up to Devil’s Bathtub. I probably would have enjoyed it more if the weather had been sunnier and about ten degrees warmer. Even though the pool looked a lot like the big pool on Devil’s Fork, the surrounding aesthetic wasn’t quite as nice. The vegetation seemed a lot more, I don’t know the word I’m looking for... scrubby? Devil’s Fork has an abundance of moss and ferns that give it a lush rainforest feel, but the area around Yellow Fork Falls looked overall drier and deader. This is probably because all the hemlocks have been killed off by the hemlock wooly adelgid, leaving behind skeletons of dead trees and piles of deadfall (including the big log in the pool). Kevin Adams says this detracts from the beauty of the waterfall in his opinion, and I would have to agree. Another way in which this falls short of the Devil’s Fork hike is the hike itself. The Devil’s Fork trail is much more intimate with the creek, staying alongside it and crossing it many times. The Yellow Fork Falls trail is pretty high and dry, and it comes nowhere near the creek until the waterfall itself. It’s probably unfair to criticize Yellow Fork Falls based on how it measures up to Devil’s Fork, though. It’s a decent little swimming hole in its own right, and its shortcomings are sort of compensated for by its seclusion, which is something Devil’s Fork no longer has. I would be up for returning to Yellow Fork Falls on a warmer, sunnier day and possibly exploring more of the creek.