Linville Gorge - Conley Cove area

After driving up to the mountains last weekend, I was looking forward to a lazy weekend at home, but the forecast turned to totally sunny. However, it's supposed to be pretty rainy after this, so I figured I should take advantage of the nice weather now and chill at home when it’s rainy. Today, I continued my explorations of lower Linville Gorge by checking out some swimming holes near the Conley Cove Trail. I had scanned the 8-ish mile stretch of river between the Conley Cove Trail and Lake James on Google Earth and marked 14 points of interest (POIs), numbered in order from downstream to upstream. Last weekend, I checked out POIs 1-3, which are the farthest downstream. POIs 4-12 are located on the ~3.5 mile stretch of river between the Pinch-In Trail (on the downstream end) and the Conley Cove Trail (on the upstream end), and 13-14 are just upstream of the Conley Cove Trail. The river is easier to see from the Linville Gorge Trail (LGT) when the leaves are off the trees, so I had originally planned to scout out POIs 4-12 over Christmas break, but I got sick and wasn't able to. I decided to go ahead and knock out a few of the upstream POIs on a summer out-and-back hike, which will leave more time to explore the ones in the middle on a future thru-hike. My plan for today was to definitely check out POIs 11-14, and possibly continue as far downstream as POI 9 depending on how I was doing on time. I decided to start on the upstream end and work my way downstream, since it looked like POIs 13-14 would lose sunlight earlier in the day.

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

In summary, I found some legit swimming holes today, but as with last weekend, none were terribly interesting. POI 14 was probably the most geologically striking by this excursion’s standards, but it’s just carry-over from Cathedral Gorge. If you’re going to come this far, then you might as well swim at the superior Cathedral just upstream (granted, for all its awesomeness, Cathedral loses sunlight fairly early in the afternoon). POI 12 was probably the runner-up for today, boasting a potentially doable jump of about 15 feet, but you’d have to jump out pretty far or you might break a leg. POIs 9, 11, and 13 were also legit swimming holes but were basically just deep spots in the river with no bells or whistles.

Today’s excursion has me thinking twice about trying to do a thru-hike from the Pinch-In to the Conley Cove Trail. In hindsight, I (or my car, rather) probably would have been better off if I had used the Spence Ridge Trail and just hiked the extra couple of miles. My car made it through today (although it took some abuse), but that was partly because the road was bone-dry. I don’t think I would attempt the section of road between the Cabin and Pinch-In Trails again without four-wheel drive, and that would mean wrangling two people with four-wheel drive vehicles. And from what I've seen so far, the swimming holes on this section of the river haven’t been terribly interesting, so it may not be worth the effort. As for the Conley Cove Trail itself, I would say it was a tad more strenuous than the Spence Ridge Trail, but not as bad as the Devil’s Hole, Cabin, and Unnamed (White Oak Stand) Trails.