Adventures of a swimming hole aficionado

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.

Today, I hiked back down into Linville Gorge via the Devil’s Hole Trail to tie up some loose ends from my winter scouting trip this past December. I had planned to do this during the Cave Falls excursion three weeks ago, but that trip was cut short by a surprise thunderstorm, so the loose ends were left untied. During the winter trip, I had scouted the section of the river along the Linville Gorge Trail (LGT) from the downstream end of Babel Tower to just upstream of the Devil’s Hole Trail. I didn’t get to one of my points of interest (a rapid named Cyclops, which is about 500 feet upstream of the Devil’s Hole Trail), and I found two others just upstream of Cyclops that looked like they had swimming hole potential. The first was an unnamed pool which I dubbed “Jean Grey” (since I’m an X-Men fan and it’s close to Cyclops). The other was Jailhouse, which looked like it might have a decent jump from a huge ledge boulder jutting out over the pool (by the way, all rapid names in this entry are according to American Whitewater).

I had been eyeing the weather all week, and the forecast for today had held steady with a 4% chance of rain. The water levels in the river spiked to around 400 cfs on Wednesday due to heavy rains, but it had receded below 80 cfs by this morning. However, the forecast was now mostly cloudy with a 15% chance of rain (a classic Blue Ridge bait-and-switch). In the mountains, you can generally multiply the forecasted rain chance by 3 to get the real rain chance. After last time, I was leery of trusting the forecast, so I just stayed at my parents’ house in Abingdon rather than splurging money on a hotel, and it was looking like I had made the right decision.

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

In summary, Cyclops, Jean Grey, and Jailhouse were all legit swimming holes, but I don’t think any of them would make it into my top picks for the gorge. I would say Cyclops was the most geologically interesting, but the pool was either cluttered with boulders or had strong currents beneath any potential jumps. Jean Grey was not very interesting geologically, but it was easily the best of the three in terms of swimming hole functionality. It was broad, deep, and had a serviceable jump (with the caveat that I was unable to thoroughly scope the depth, and that it might be dangerous to get up onto said jump). Jailhouse had some impressive boulders (which I already knew from my winter scouting), but I wasn’t super into it today. It kind of has a closed-in feel (which I guess is how it gets its name), and it seemed like any potential jumps would require a precision landing, which would be difficult to pull off without being able to see down into the water. Not being able to thoroughly check the depth due to today’s poor water clarity was kind of a bummer. I was so focused on the water receding to swimmable levels after the past week’s rain that I neglected to consider that the silt would take longer to settle. Overall, even though it never rained, it just wasn’t a very nice day for swimming hole exploration.

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.

Yesterday, I decided to take advantage of this year’s Climate Change Christmas to go scouting for swimming holes in Linville Gorge. After my most recent visit in September, I found that the Linville Gorge Trail (LGT) stayed fairly close to the river, but the summer foliage blocked the view and made it difficult to scout for swimming holes. The air temperatures over the Christmas holidays this year have been in the 60’s, even in the mountains, so I figured this would be a good time to look for potential swimming holes to check out next summer. In addition to the unseasonably warm temperatures and the leaves being off the trees, the river is currently near summer flow due to a drought, so it looks about the same right now as it does in summer as far as water levels are concerned (the river yesterday was at 59 cfs/1.08 ft, according to the USGS gauge).

On my last visit, I had checked out the section of the river between the Spence Ridge Trail and the Devil’s Hole Trail. My objective for yesterday was to pick up where I left off and check out the section between the Devil’s Hole Trail and Babel Tower. I wasn’t sure if there would be any worthwhile swimming holes here, which was all the more reason to explore it during winter so as not to waste a nice summer day if there weren't any ideal swimming spots. I had marked a few points of interest on Google Earth that I wanted to check out, all but one of which were directly above or below named rapids (all rapid names are according to American Whitewater). The points of interest (starting at Babel Tower and going downstream) were Used to be a Portage, Wheelie, Zoom Flume, Zig Zag, Skylight, Diagonal Chaos, Death Penalty, Adam’s Oof, Jailhouse, Cyclops, and an unnamed spot just upstream of Cyclops that I dubbed “Jean Grey” (since I’m an X-Men fan and it’s close to Cyclops). Of these, I was most interested in checking out Jailhouse. My plan was to hike down from the Babel Tower Trail to the intersection of the LGT, and then follow the LGT downstream as far as Jailhouse, or maybe all the way to the Devil’s Hole Trail depending on how I was doing on time.

( Click here for the full Babel Tower to Jailhouse scouting report with pictures and videos )
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Today, in sticking with the Linville Gorge winter exploration theme, I went to Linville Falls with Miranda. She wanted an easy/moderate hike so she could bring her dog, so we only did the overlooks and didn’t hike down to the plunge basin. This was fine with me, since my legs were pretty angry from yesterday. Also, swimming is prohibited at Linville Falls (with signs warning of a $5,000 fine and/or 6 months in jail for violators), so there wasn’t much point in scouting out the plunge basin. The last time I visited Linville Falls was way back in 2000, and as I recall, the plunge basin would be among the most epic swimming holes in the state if swimming were allowed (some people still do it, though).

( Click here for the full Linville Falls trip report with pictures and videos )
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In summary, after yesterday’s scouting, I would say the pools that warrant further exploration in the summer are Jean Grey and maybe Jailhouse, both of which are close enough to the Devil’s Hole Trail that they could potentially be tacked onto the end of a Cave Falls expedition. The section of the LGT between Babel Tower and the Devil’s Hole Trail stayed pretty close to river level (usually no more than 50 feet above it), and there were scramble trails that allowed river access near most of my points of interest. On the Babel Tower end of yesterday’s hike, Skylight and the big pool between Blindside and Death Penalty might be worth a closer look, but I probably wouldn’t make a special trip for those, as they are too far upstream to include with Cave Falls.

I didn’t really learn anything new from today’s visit to Linville Falls. From the overlook views, the river does not seem very interesting below the falls, so I probably wouldn’t make a special trip to check out the Gulf Branch confluence downstream of the falls unless I were tacking it onto a Linville Falls plunge basin hike.

I originally wasn’t planning on doing anything this weekend, but I saw that Saturday and Sunday were both supposed to be in the 80s and dry in the mountains, which will probably be the only time that happens in the foreseeable future, so I quickly decided on Friday that I was going to go to the mountains. My main goal for this weekend was to finish “Cinnamon” Creek. That isn’t the creek’s real name, but rather the alias I gave it in my first entry to keep the location secret. I had originally planned on doing Cinnamon Creek as an end-of-summer trek, since it is pretty high on the treachery scale, and I wouldn’t want to break my ankle or something right at the beginning of summer and be out of commission for the rest of swimming hole season. However, with all the coronavirus restrictions, I don’t have high hopes for this being a productive swimming hole year, so I decided to go ahead and go for it. It has rained pretty torrentially for the past few weeks, so I knew the creeks and rivers would be high, which is bad for larger waterways but works to the advantage of smaller streams like Cinnamon Creek. My brother Brian, who had gone with me to Cinnamon Creek last time, said he was free both days this weekend. We originally planned on Saturday, but he remembered he had something going on that night, so we changed to Sunday. I figured I would hit a different swimming hole on Saturday, so I made plans with Miranda to go to Upper Creek Falls. I knew the creek would be high, but I thought that also might make the slides better. I went by Kohl’s on Friday after work to get a new swimsuit, since the only one I had that was good for butt-sliding and had good pockets got ripped at California’s Rock Creek last summer.

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

In summary, I’m glad to have finally conquered all of my points of interest for Cinnamon Creek. There ended up being seven waterfalls in total (eight if you count the ten-footer halfway between the road and the main waterfall zone, which I didn’t mention in this entry). Cascade #4 had a legit swimming hole with a low jump, and cascades #5 and #7 had pools that were deep but a little too small in diameter to be ideal for swimming (illegit swimming holes, I guess?). From a waterfall viewing standpoint, I would say the highlight cascades are #5, #7, and #2, in that order. As I predicted, the creek was a little higher this time, so the waterfalls had a bit more volume than last time. This is not really a place you would go if your main objective was to see a waterfall or go swimming, because you can do better in both departments at more easily accessible areas. The allure for me was more the adventure of finding something completely on my own without being spoon-fed any information whatsoever by published sources. I probably wouldn’t go to the trouble of bushwhacking to and then climbing down these waterfalls a third time, but this was still a cool little secret spot.

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.

It was sunny in the mountains last Saturday, and I felt guilty for passing up the opportunity to take advantage of that, so I decided to do back-to-back swimming hole treks this weekend to make up for it since the forecast looked pretty rain-free. Today I went to Yellow Fork Falls, which is on the opposite side of Linville Gorge from the Wilson Creek area. This is the first Kevin Adams inspired swimming hole trek that I have done, as I would probably have never discovered this one without his North Carolina Waterfalls book. I was able to find a couple of blogs about it after doing an internet search, but it seems to mostly be under the radar. This one was currently at the top of my swimming hole hit list in the Boone/Morganton area because the clear blue swimming hole looked similar to the one at Devil’s Bathtub, which has recently become overrun with tourists after going viral on social media. I was hopeful that Yellow Fork could become my surrogate Devil’s Fork.

Although the hike is fairly short (1.1 miles, according to my fitness tracker), I didn’t want to solo this particular location because it is pretty secluded, and the trailhead is, as Kevin Adams puts it, nondescript. My friend Ty had recently moved to Asheville and was up for checking out some of the waterfalls in the area, so we met up at a gas station along I-40 and drove out into the middle of nowhere. I caught a glimpse of the mouth of Linville Gorge as the paved road gave way to gravel. I had the trailhead marked in my GPS (coordinates courtesy of Kevin Adams’ book), which was fortunate, as the trailhead is indeed nondescript. We walked along the road and had trouble finding it even with the GPS. We finally just went into the woods at an area that didn’t look too thick, and we noticed the trail to our left. We probably would have found the trailhead if we had gone ten feet further down the road. The trail was worn, but it was also narrow and not pruned. It was not very steep until we got near the creek, and we even had to climb down a wooden ladder as we neared the waterfall.

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

In conclusion, Yellow Fork Falls was alright, but it didn’t quite measure up to Devil’s Bathtub. I probably would have enjoyed it more if the weather had been sunnier and about ten degrees warmer. Even though the pool looked a lot like the big pool on Devil’s Fork, the surrounding aesthetic wasn’t quite as nice. The vegetation seemed a lot more, I don’t know the word I’m looking for... scrubby? Devil’s Fork has an abundance of moss and ferns that give it a lush rainforest feel, but the area around Yellow Fork Falls looked overall drier and deader. This is probably because all the hemlocks have been killed off by the hemlock wooly adelgid, leaving behind skeletons of dead trees and piles of deadfall (including the big log in the pool). Kevin Adams says this detracts from the beauty of the waterfall in his opinion, and I would have to agree. Another way in which this falls short of the Devil’s Fork hike is the hike itself. The Devil’s Fork trail is much more intimate with the creek, staying alongside it and crossing it many times. The Yellow Fork Falls trail is pretty high and dry, and it comes nowhere near the creek until the waterfall itself. It’s probably unfair to criticize Yellow Fork Falls based on how it measures up to Devil’s Fork, though. It’s a decent little swimming hole in its own right, and its shortcomings are sort of compensated for by its seclusion, which is something Devil’s Fork no longer has. I would be up for returning to Yellow Fork Falls on a warmer, sunnier day and possibly exploring more of the creek.