"Cinnamon Creek" & Zigzag Falls

Today I got to finally (partially) knock off something that has been on my to-do list for the past two or three years. After checking out Gragg Prong and Steels Creek in 2015, I got into the habit of scanning creeks and rivers on Google Earth and marking points of interest (POIs) that looked like potential swimming holes or waterfalls. It started with scanning larger creeks with known swimming holes, like Upper Creek and Harper Creek, but I admittedly got a little carried away with it and even started scanning smaller tributaries. I would first check topo maps for areas where creeks dropped significantly over short distances, and then I would scan those drop zones on Google Earth to see if I could see any whitewater. There was one creek in particular that caught my attention, which I will call “Cinnamon Creek” to keep the location a secret (I know this spot is probably too esoteric for most people, but I don’t want to be the first to give up the location on a place that has avoided the internet thus far). Cinnamon Creek drops about 200 feet over less than a quarter mile, and a scan of Google Earth showed a few obvious cascades and one possible swimming hole. These features didn’t look that significant, but I’ve been to quite a few good swimming holes that look like nothing on Google Earth, so I was curious to get down there and check the area out for myself. I had marked three points of interest (POIs) numbered in order from upstream to downstream. POIs 1 and 3 were possible waterfalls at what appeared to be the beginning and end of the drop zone, and POI 2 was a potential swimming hole. The stretch of creek between POIs 2 and 3 was largely hidden by shadows and canopy on Google Earth, so I refer to this area as the “shadow zone”. I had no idea what could be hiding in the shadow zone. I've scoured the internet looking for information on this creek, but I could find literally nothing about it other than the occasional hiking blogger mentioning that they crossed it while hiking on the Mountains-to-Sea trail. Even waterfall guru Kevin Adams makes no mention of it in the latest edition of his North Carolina Waterfalls book, and he lists some pretty obscure spots. It was pretty clear that if I really wanted to know what was there, I was going to have to explore it myself.

I kept this excursion on the back-burner for 2016, as I still hadn’t finished checking out all the highlights of the Wilson Creek area at that time. I was hoping to get to it in 2017, but several different stars needed to align for this excursion to happen: I needed 1) a bone-dry day, 2) on a summer weekend, and 3) when a buddy was a available who wouldn’t beat my ass for dragging them on a “creekwhack” (creek walk + bushwhack) that potentially offered no reward. There was one day that met all those criteria during the first weekend of June last year. I foolishly passed it up thinking there would be another opportunity that summer, but there wasn’t. The only person I know within driving distance who would be down for this type of trek is my brother, Brian, who is a pretty hardcore hiker and backpacker (his credentials include hiking the entire Appalachian and Pacific Crest Trails, among others). Our schedules don’t match up most of the time, but he was off this weekend and up for an excursion. As of two days ago, the forecast called for both Saturday and Sunday to be dry, so I planned to do back-to-back swimming hole excursions in the Wilson Creek Area this weekend. Tomorrow (Sunday) has been changed to a 60 percent chance of rain, but today was still supposed to be dry, so I decided today would be the best day to do Cinnamon Creek.

Another place I have been wanting to check out is Zigzag Falls on an unnamed tributary of Steels Creek. It didn’t seem worthy of a special trip, but it is close to the road, so I figured it would make a good tacked-on ending to another excursion. I got close to it in 2016 after I went to Wilson Creek Gorge with my friend Miranda, but she didn’t have any desire to bushwhack to it (or to wait on me to bushwhack to it), so that has been somewhat of a loose end for the past couple of years. Kevin Adams mentions in his book that the upper portion of the waterfall has a pool in it, and Google Earth seems to confirm this, so I was interested to see if the pool could be a swimming hole.

I spent the night in Greensboro last night and drove up to Pineola this morning. Brian met me at the Pineola Inn where I am staying, which is super convenient to most of the swimming holes in the Wilson Creek and Linville Gorge areas. I ate a Jersey Mike’s sub that I had picked up on the way over, and then we headed out to Cinnamon Creek.

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

In summary, we saw some pretty cool stuff today. I would have thought Cinnamon Creek was kind of "meh" had it been along an established hiking trail with other people around, but the secret hideout feel and the fact that there was literally no trace of anyone ever having been there made it a fun adventure. We didn't find anything major, but I do enjoy a good creek walk, and it’s nice when there are at least some cascades or swimming holes to make things interesting. I would say it was nice to have finally satisfied my curiosity for Cinnamon Creek, since I explored the area I was most curious about and actually found a pool that I would say could pass for a legit swimming hole (although it was not the pool I had initially thought would be the swimming hole). However, it feels incomplete since I didn’t make it all the way to the bottom of the waterfall area. We probably could have done it if we had gotten started an hour or two earlier. Not getting to the bottom is going to be a loose end for me. It seemed so attainable, but better safe than sorry, I guess. Each time we descended a cascade, we were potentially getting ourselves into deeper and deeper shit from a getting-help/rescue standpoint should something go wrong, and the thought of that became too much after we were four cascades deep with only a couple of hours of daylight left. I am curious to see the rest of the waterfall area, but I would want a group of at least four people next time, and I’m not sure I could round up enough people who are both willing and able to complete this trek (I would probably lose even the most adventurous people I know at the part that requires swimming through a deep pool of 60 degree water). Perhaps Team Waterfall will see this and pick up where I left off. I might be content seeing pictures of what I missed, but the completionist in me wants to get back out there and finish what I started. As far as Zigzag Falls, I would say curiosity satisfied. The potential swimming hole didn’t end up being anything terribly interesting, and the waterfall was cool from what we saw, but I don’t feel the need to get more vantage points of it.
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Update: We returned to Cinnamon Creek in 2020 and checked out the remaining points of interest. Click here for Part 2 of our Cinnamon Creek explorations.