Retirement Hiking Trips.

Now that I'm retired I work my part-time job anywhere from zero days to four days per week. It is weird not having to go and punch a clock every day, (sometimes six days a week when I was a letter carrier, and seven days a week when I was self-employed). I sit there and realize that I don't have to rise before the sun to go to a drudge labor job. Yes, I sometimes still get up before the dawn, but that's only because sometimes I want to hit the road early to go hiking or kayaking. Big difference.

I'm still having a hard time dealing with that.

Saturday I drove up to the mountains and did a little bit of hiking before the rainstorms scoured the peaks. I had two hikes planned but only did one, down into Linville Gorge to see the base of Linville Falls which I had not visited in many, many years. The hike was a whole lot easier than I recalled. But after I climbed out of the gorge the rains hit.

At any rate, here are some photos and a video of the hike.

Top O' the Falls!

Since the part of the Parkway where I wanted to hike was closed to me, I hopped off an the village of Linville Falls and drove over to the Kistler Highway to dally at the edges of the Gorge. First I stopped at the first overlook and took the .4-mile hike down to see the top of the falls.

At this point I had gotten an upset stomach and didn't feel like hanging around too much and ended up just taking some photos and strolling back to my car as the clouds gathered again and it started snowing. Back on the Kistler Highway, I saw a few wild turkeys and decided that my next, and last stop of the day would be the always fun Wiseman's View farther down the gorge.

I'll cover that tomorrow...

There were once a lot of grand old hemlocks in the gorge. Now they're all dead, except for a very few that the National Park Service has treated against the hwa infestation. Here is one fairly large one that is recovering after being treated.

This is the first set of cascades before the big main section of Linville Falls.

And this is the river as it goes over the precipice into the plunge pool far below.

The top section of Linville Falls.

The Linville Fools

Morons!

Some years ago on a day-trip to Linville Falls and the Blue Ridge Parkway a friend and I hiked down to the base of the falls with the idea of going for a swim. Back in the day there wasn't much of a big deal made about swimming in the plunge pool beneath the falls. These days, there are signs up claiming that it's not allowed, but I suppose folk still go there to swim.

On the day we went we did indeed go swimming. It's a great place for it. The water's good and deep there and
it's just a perfect place to cool off on a hot summer day.

However, when we got there we discovered that a family of insane people had preceded us to the falls. The family consisted of a father, and children of various ages and their friends. The dad was standing at points around the plunge pool using a bulky old-style video camera to record the antics of his various kids and their pals. What they were doing was climbing as high as they could up the walls of the gorge and leaping into the river far, far below.

His oldest kids, teenage boys, were jumping from heights varying between 75 and 100 feet. The younger kids, girls, were leaping from about twenty to thirty feet.

The worst aspect of what was going on was that the target one had to hit from the highest parts of the jumps was a circle of water about ten or twelve feet on a side. If you varied beyond this target you were likely to hit a boulder or shallow water and be killed. I had never witnessed such insanity. This went on for the entire time we were down there swimming, and they were still making the incredible leaps when we climbed out of the pool to hike back to the top.

No one was killed while we were there, but one of the older boys finally did manage to hurt himself by hitting the water at a bad angle. He then dragged himself to shore where he was obviously in a great deal of pain. However, after some time he seemed to recover and was once again scaling the cliffs around the falls and leaping back into that small target.

I've always referred to these folk as "The Linville Fools". It seems appropriate.