Up, Up, Up to Upper Catawba Falls
Blue Ridge Trip '24 #31
Old Fort, NC - Sat, 7 Sep 2024. 1:30pm
Our hike up to Catawba Falls in western North Carolina today was enjoyable. The hike wasn't too bad of a climb, especially with a wide trail the whole way. And the falls were beautiful. For a long time that was the end of the line for most hikers. The brave few knew there was another falls high up above the main one. The even fewer brave dared to climb up the canyon to it, pulling themselves up on ropes hung over the cascades of the lower falls or looping around over the mountain ridge to descend from the top. Now there are stairs.
Link: watch video on YouTube
Within the past few years the Forest Service built an elaborate set of stairs to guide hikers up the canyon. These stairs are great in that pretty much anybody can climb them. ...Well, anybody who can climb more than 500 stairs, that is.
Fortunately this is a situation where hard work pays off. Not only did climbing the stairs afford us different views of the main falls as we ascended, it led us to this beautiful spot with the upper falls. Before the stairs were built, this spot might've seen a few visitors on a Saturday afternoon. Today it's seeing hundreds. Making the photo above I shared above was challenging.... Challenging to capture the whole falls while not including kids in diapers peeing in the water, young women stripping down to their bikini tops and posing for cheesecake pictures for their social media, and at least one guy who was either recharging his Ki or in full-blown mental health crisis suffering flashbacks to being bombed in Afghanistan. Well, it's their great outdoors, too.
From these falls there are two routes back to the trailhead. One, we could have retraced our route back down the stairs past the falls. Two, a trail continues up over the ridge to the east then snakes down the ridge to the trailhead. We hiked the ridge trail thinking we might see long distance views from atop the ridge. And even if we hadn't decided on that in advance, the fact that 2/3 of our fellow hikers were heading back down the stairs would've inspired us to take the path less traveled. Alas, there were barely any view from the trail over the ridge. And it wasn't even a particularly nice trail. It was a fire road with an ugly cut as it ascended the near side of the ridge. It was like the Forest Service decided, "Let's run a bulldozer through here and be done with it." But at least we had the memories of those beautiful falls to tie us over. In beauty I walk.
Old Fort, NC - Sat, 7 Sep 2024. 1:30pm
Our hike up to Catawba Falls in western North Carolina today was enjoyable. The hike wasn't too bad of a climb, especially with a wide trail the whole way. And the falls were beautiful. For a long time that was the end of the line for most hikers. The brave few knew there was another falls high up above the main one. The even fewer brave dared to climb up the canyon to it, pulling themselves up on ropes hung over the cascades of the lower falls or looping around over the mountain ridge to descend from the top. Now there are stairs.
Click to viewLink: watch video on YouTube
Within the past few years the Forest Service built an elaborate set of stairs to guide hikers up the canyon. These stairs are great in that pretty much anybody can climb them. ...Well, anybody who can climb more than 500 stairs, that is.
Fortunately this is a situation where hard work pays off. Not only did climbing the stairs afford us different views of the main falls as we ascended, it led us to this beautiful spot with the upper falls. Before the stairs were built, this spot might've seen a few visitors on a Saturday afternoon. Today it's seeing hundreds. Making the photo above I shared above was challenging.... Challenging to capture the whole falls while not including kids in diapers peeing in the water, young women stripping down to their bikini tops and posing for cheesecake pictures for their social media, and at least one guy who was either recharging his Ki or in full-blown mental health crisis suffering flashbacks to being bombed in Afghanistan. Well, it's their great outdoors, too.
From these falls there are two routes back to the trailhead. One, we could have retraced our route back down the stairs past the falls. Two, a trail continues up over the ridge to the east then snakes down the ridge to the trailhead. We hiked the ridge trail thinking we might see long distance views from atop the ridge. And even if we hadn't decided on that in advance, the fact that 2/3 of our fellow hikers were heading back down the stairs would've inspired us to take the path less traveled. Alas, there were barely any view from the trail over the ridge. And it wasn't even a particularly nice trail. It was a fire road with an ugly cut as it ascended the near side of the ridge. It was like the Forest Service decided, "Let's run a bulldozer through here and be done with it." But at least we had the memories of those beautiful falls to tie us over. In beauty I walk.