Wilson Creek Trail & Little Wilson Creek - Part 2

Last year, my brother Brian and I hiked the Wilson Creek Trail along an upper section of Wilson Creek upstream from the more popular Wilson Creek Gorge. Before that hike, I had scanned the creek on Google Earth and marked 13 points of interest (POIs) that looked like potential swimming holes. We got to the first ten POIs on the previous hike, but the trail left the creek and headed back up to the road between POIs 10 and 11, meaning that POIs 11-13 would require a creek walk. It was already late by the time we had reached this point in the trail, so we decided we didn’t have time for POIs 11-13 on that trip. There were several weekends with nice weather this summer that I wanted to try and wrap this up, but Brian usually had other plans.

After swimming-holing the hell out of August with back-to-back trips to Tennessee and California, I was really looking forward to just chillaxing at home and doing absolutely nothing this weekend. I haven’t had a full day of downtime since the beginning of August, and I’ve been exhausted all of this past week, probably due to jet lag from returning from California. However, the weather in the North Carolina mountains was supposed to be warm and sunny all weekend, followed by an extended period of rain, so I figured I could squeeze in one last weekend of swimming hole action before fall arrives and I go into hibernation. Brian was free this weekend, so we decided to knock out the rest of the Wilson Creek Trail today.

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

In summary, this excursion did nothing to change my mind that the highlights of the Wilson Creek Trail are on the downstream end, even though the new stuff we saw today technically wasn’t along the trail. We didn’t find any legit swimming holes that we had not already seen on last year’s hike, but it was a decent and fairly easy creek walk, and it was nice to satisfy my lingering curiosities from last year. We might make it a point to creek-walk the upper section of Wilson Creek between the Forest Road and Edgemont Road, but that will probably be more for a time when I just want to do something outdoorsy and am not itching to go swimming, as I would not expect to find any legit swimming holes there.