Linville Gorge - Cathedral

Today, Brian and I went down into Linville Gorge to check out the swimming hole situation on a section of the river that the boating community refer to as Cathedral Gorge. According to American Whitewater, Cathedral Gorge stretches from the Spence Ridge Trail crossing to a small waterfall that spills into a large swimming hole. Checking out this stretch of the river has been on my back burner for the past two years, but I recently saw a youtube video featuring Linville Gorge swimming holes (one of which was the aforementioned Cathedral Gorge swimming hole), which inspired me to bump it up on my to-do list. My first trip down into the gorge two years ago was to check out Babel Tower Falls, a sliding rapid with a swimming hole. While the scenery was impressive, I thought the swimming hole was just so/so. The section of the gorge on today’s agenda was what I had originally wanted to do on my previous trip, but taking the Spence Ridge Trail requires crossing the river, so I wanted to do a hike that didn’t require a river crossing for my first trip in case the river was too rough to ford. It was crossable in most areas near Babel Tower Falls, which gave me the green light to use the Spence Ridge Trail to access the gorge. One thing I noted from my Babel Tower Falls excursion was that the water seemed a little rough and murky (the gage height was 1.01 feet that day), so I was looking for days with slightly lower water levels for future Linville Gorge swimming hole excursions. Looking at the past gage data, it looked like 0.9 feet was a typical summer flow, at least until 2017. It seems like the summers have been exceptionally wet, even for the mountains, since 2017, which meant that summer gage heights below 1.00 feet have been the exception rather than the rule in recent years. The river never got below 1.00 feet last summer, and it didn’t happen for the first time this summer until a week or two ago.

Just to avoid confusion before we get started, there are two waterfalls in Cathedral Gorge that people refer to as "Cathedral Falls". One is a high waterfall that spills into the river from a small unnamed tributary stream, and the other is the aforementioned small waterfall (which is a class V rapid in high water) on the Linville River that the boating community refers to as Cathedral Falls or just Cathedral (all rapid names I use in this entry are according to A Wet State and American Whitewater's listing for the Linville River). For the purposes of this trip report, “Cathedral Falls” is the high tributary waterfall, and “Cathedral” is the rapid/small waterfall and its plunge pool on the Linville River. Cathedral Falls did not appear to drop into the river near any swimming holes, from what I could see in pictures of it. The Cathedral rapid, on the other hand, appeared to have a fairly large swimming hole with multiple jumping opportunities, so that was our main point of interest for today.

Brian had stayed the night after yesterday’s excursion, and I still wasn’t sure what we were going to do today. We still need to finish “Cinnamon Creek”, but after yesterday’s excursion at upper Wilson Creek, I figured there wouldn’t be much water going over the waterfalls since Cinnamon Creek is a smaller creek. I have also been meaning to explore the section of Upper Creek between the Mountains-to-Sea Trail crossing and Upper Creek Falls, but that would be one hell of a creek walk, and I did not come prepared for it. I had kind of wanted to save Cathedral for a time when I really needed a sweet new swimming hole, but I figured it made the most sense to take advantage of the low water levels on the Linville River while we had the chance.

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

In summary, I was much more pleased with today’s Linville Gorge excursion than with the Babel Tower swimming hole in 2017. I would say the Cathedral swimming hole is the best swimming hole I have found so far in the Linville Gorge and Wilson Creek areas, and it’s actually one of the best swimming holes I have been to this summer, including the ones from California and Tennessee. As much as I like the swimming holes in the Wilson Creek area, there aren’t really any with non-sketchy jumping opportunities, so it was nice to finally find one with serviceable jumps. The water was a bit sudsy, as had been the case at Babel Tower Falls, but the clarity here was good enough to see the bottom in most areas to scope out jumping spots. I guess the only downside to this area is that you have to be opportunistic with the water levels, given that the Linville River is a larger waterway than most of the Wilson Creek area creeks. The Spence Ridge Trail swimming hole was also a legit swimming hole and a good place to cool off, but I probably wouldn’t hike all the way into the gorge just for that particular spot. Although it is large and deep, there aren’t really any noteworthy jumping opportunities, and it seems to get a lot of traffic, since it is at a trail junction. I guess it serves the function of deterring people from checking out other, more difficult-to-access swimming holes, so I’m certainly not complaining about its existence.

I thought this weekend was going to get me super burnt out on swimming holes, since I was really hoping to just relax at home after all the traveling I’ve done in the past month, but Cathedral did just the opposite and rejuvenated my appetite for more swimming holes right at the end of the summer. The mountains generally get too chilly for swimming to be enjoyable after the first or second week of September, so that’s probably all for this year, but I’m definitely interested to get back into the gorge and see if I can find another swimming hole on the level of Cathedral.