The weather forecast in the mountains has been mostly rainy this month, but it looked like this Friday and Saturday (and possibly Sunday) were going to be dry, so I decided to take advantage of it. Although the rain showers this month have been frequent, they must not have been torrential in the Linville Gorge area, because the river has remained at a relatively swimmable summer flow. I decided to take advantage of this, so today I checked out a rapid called Four Foot Ledge (hereafter, 4FL) on the Linville River. This one wasn’t high on my to-do list, but I am running out of points of interest in the northern half of the gorge that would be
safe not completely moronic to check out alone, and I haven’t done much research on the southern half of the gorge (I plan to focus more on that next year), so 4FL it was. In kayaking videos, it looked like a nice bedrock slide, with more bedrock slabs just downstream and possible swimming holes both above and below the rapid. However, kayaking is done in much higher water, so it’s hard to tell what this spot would look like in a summer flow. There was only one way to find out.
Four Foot Ledge is located where the river snakes around a series of peninsulas, culminating with Babel Tower, before straightening out and flowing generally south. I’m not sure if the peninsulas have names, but Allen T. Hyde mentions in his book
The Linville Gorge and Wilson Creek Hikers Guide: An Introduction that there’s an unofficial side trail that he refers to as the Island Ridge Trail that goes across the ridge of the peninsula immediately to the west of Babel Tower. He also mentions a “Hyatt’s Knob”, but it is unclear if this is the Island Ridge peninsula or the next one to the west of it. For the purposes of this entry, the peninsulas (going from west to east) are Brushy Ridge, Hyatt’s Knob, Island Ridge, and Babel Tower (with the caveat that I might have the first three names wrong). While we’re on the topic of nomenclature,
American Whitewater and
A Wet State give conflicting names for Four Foot Ledge; the former refers to it as California Dreamin, but the latter calls it Four Foot Ledge and instead refers to Bynum Bluff Falls (a small waterfall at the base of Brushy Ridge) as California Dreamin’. I’m going to use A Wet State’s naming scheme on this entry, as they do a better job at naming the rapids upstream of Babel Tower.
Now that we have all
that out of the way, 4FL is located between Island Ridge and Hyatt’s Knob. It looked like the most direct route would be to hike to
Babel Tower Falls via the Linville Gorge Trail (LGT) and then follow the river upstream along the riverbank. There is another rapid called Two-Tiered Slide (hereafter, 2TS) a little less than 0.5 miles upstream of 4FL, so I was considering making a loop all the way around Hyatt’s Knob and picking up the Cabin Trail (a short but steep rim-to-river trail about a mile west of Babel Tower that ends at the western base of Hyatt’s Knob), but that would be about a mile of river-walking alone in an area not paralleled by a trail, so I was only going to try that if it looked super easy.
( Click here for the full trip report with pictures and videos )In summary, Four Foot Ledge was nothing spectacular compared to some of the other swimming holes in Linville Gorge, but it was a nice, secluded area (today, at least) with a pool for swimming and plenty of rock slabs for sunbathing. Even though the swimming hole
per se was nothing special, I felt a certain affinity for this spot, perhaps due to its Californian aesthetic. I blew off Two-Tiered Slide today because river-walking all the way around Hyatt’s Knob didn’t seem like a good idea to do alone. Ascending the upper portion of the Cabin Trail turned out not to be as bad as I thought, so I might take it all the way down to the river at some point and approach Two-Tiered Slide from upstream.
