I stopped going to some of my old favorite hiking destinations because, frankly, they just got too damned crowded. One of those is Panthertown Valley. It's just so crowded that I might as well be in town sometimes. So I stopped going. The Linville Gorge is similarly popular. However, for some reason that I can't quite figure, I can still go there when I absolutely know the place is full of humans, and yet see no one else. And it's a pretty constricted space when you figure that most folk stay on the trails. So it isn't as if most of them are bushwhacking and that's why I don't bump into them. I reckon there is just enough wilderness so that the people are fortunately widely spaced and I'm free to enjoy my solitude. So it was on Sunday. I had feared that the Gorge would be heavily used that day, and I was right. Everyone, it seems, has Sunday off. And everyone who wanted to be there, it seems, was. I wanted to hike the Rock Jock Trail, staring at the northern terminus, then hike to the southern end and back to my vehicle. I figured the parking lot for the trailhead would be popular, and I was right. I couldn't even park in the fenced lot and had to place my truck outside the barrier in a clear spot along the road. After that, I began my hike. And I neither heard nor saw anyone for several hours. I finally did end up encountering eight other hikers at various spots, mainly near the parking area on my way back. But for most of the hike I had a lot of space all to myself, and lots of free time to sit and ponder the world in human-free silence.
The parking area I chose to use. My truck is at the far end.
I love National Forest wilderness signs.
The intersection of the Rock Jock Trail with the Conley Cove Trail. Go right and stay on the rim of the Gorge. Take a left and plunge down to the bottom.
The Rock Jock Trail is great for the vast, open views.
Looking across the Gorge at the aptly named Tablerock Mountain
The trail moves in and out of the forest.
After a couple of miles of hiking, I had my lunch spot.
The view from where I had my lunch.
Just about the only wildlife I can always count on seeing in the Gorge is the Turkey vulture. They abound there. I caught this shot with a telephoto lens, camera set for action shots.
Two days ago I was a blanket of snow and ice covering the entire Gorge from base to summit, end to end. Half a foot deep and holding the wilderness in a frozen grip. Today. A blot of sleet and snow no larger than your fist. That fist you shook at the skies on that last, cold day. And I? A skein of ice. Sublimating to the air. Melting slowly into the forest loam. Spring is here. The sun is warming the air and nourishing the earth. But I am not undone. Wednesday night. Wednesday night. I will return. 15 degrees and heavy snow. A last hurrah? You never know. There's the rest of March, and April is not out of the question.
One really nice spot along the Rock Jock Trail is a place called Blue Jay Falls. Now, calling it a waterfall is a stretch. I liken it to a similar area in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park called 'The Place of a Thousand Drips'. That's what you have here. The water filtering down from the top of gorge emerges atop the rock face here and drips and trickles down the little cliff on its way down to the Linville River. Every time I'm here I'm tempted to just drink right from the little falls and springs. When I first started hiking and backpacking back in 1973 I wouldn't hesitate to drink the water in such a spot. And I never got ill from doing so. However, these days the back country is cheek-by-jowl with people and dogs; all of whom shit in the woods. It's just not worth drinking unfiltered or untreated water. Maybe it would be okay, but maybe you'd hit some water infested with giardia or e coli, etc. It just isn't worth the risk today with the popularity of hiking and backpacking.
The section with the heaviest flow. The most likely spot to use for filtering water to refill empty bottles and flasks.
This is what most of the falls is like: just a series of dripping springs.
Self-portrait at one end of the falls.
The "falls" extends for quite a way along the trail.
This hike was, as with every hike I've taken in the Linville Gorge Wilderness, a lot of fun. However, the going was really tough and exhausting. It's very difficult to hike through soft, slushy, melting snow cover. You're constantly on the watch to prevent a fall and it's exceedingly hard to move with any speed at all. Thus, it takes a lot longer to cover a mile and the going is both mentally and physically more demanding.
We had been led to expect cold temperatures and even a good chance of snow flurries. Every weather report I'd accessed had called for the day to get no higher than 35 degrees with clouds and probable winter precipitation. So I dressed accordingly, with thermal underwear and scarf, etc. As it turned out, there was no snow at all and the skies remained mostly clear for the whole day. Also, it got rather warm--just from the feel of it, I'd say it was close to 50 degrees for most of the hike! I had to shed my gloves and scarf, earmuffs, cap. I found myself wishing that I hadn't worn the long underwear and had put on convertible pants rather than my favorite pair of hiking slacks. Oh, well.
Balanced Rock. Some time back I had my photo taken from atop this rock. Even in good conditions climbing up there is a dicey prospect. With the snow and ice it was out of the question.
We parked at the Pinch In Traihead and walked down the Kistler Highway a short distance to the Rock Jock Trailhead. I'd hiked Rock Jock before, and it's a really good trail, and one of the best for a view-heavy hike of the western rim of the gorge. It was relocated a couple of years ago when the original Rock Jock Trail was pretty much utterly destroyed in the last drought-aggravated wild fire that ravaged the south end of Linville Gorge. That fire pretty much denuded that part of the wilderness area of its tree cover and it will be many decades before those forests recover. A good portion of the hike is through trees that have been reduced to blackened coals. But shrubs and saplings are beginning to take over, so in a few years it should at least be green again.
I have yet to find any area in the East to be as rugged as Linville Gorge. And I've hiked a great deal. Not even the Whites of New England or the Longfellow Mountains of Maine seem to be as rugged as the terrain of Linville Gorge.
The sign at the trailhead for the Rock Jock Trail.
I parked the truck at the Pinch In Trailhead.
Shortoff Mountain and the outlet of the river.
Fantastic view of the gorge--prominent peaks are Table Rock and Hawksbill.
Blue Jay Falls: The trail runs along the base of this little waterfall.
This video indicates the extreme damage done to the forests of the gorge by the fires of 2007.
Roughly, this was the route of our hike. The blue line was the hike down into the gorge along the Pinch In Trail. The red line indicates the retracing of the route back up Pinch In then a cross country bushwhack to where we picked up the Rock Jock Trail to where it intersected with the Conley Cove Trail and then to the parking lot where we picked up Jack's truck and drove back to my truck at the Pinch In parking lot. (Whew! What a hike!)
Jack took this shot of Boone, me, and Andy Kunkle at our last stop along the Rock Jock Trail. I, particularly, had to make a rest stop. My thighs were cramping from being out of shape for all of the extreme climbing we'd been doing. Also, my body had sweated out a lot of minerals and this always exacerbates the cramping in my thighs, sometimes even when I'm in good physical condition. I was eating a peanut butter bagel to get some salts and such back into my system. Jack ended up giving me a caffein-loaded aspirin pain killer that finally did the trick and got me feeling normal again.
The Critter Philosopher
Accepting an apology is like offering your back to a very sharp blade.
Well, I don’t really recommend the hike I took on Saturday, March 21, if you haven’t been hiking in many months. Don’t get me wrong—it’s a fantastic hike packed with so much scenery that one finds it difficult to look where your feet are going. Instead, all you want to do is gape at the surrounding peaks, the steep walls of the gorge, the soaring cliff faces, the tumbling river, the blooming flowers…well, you see what I mean.
But it had been far too long since I’d hit the trails. My legs were out of shape and my lungs were still scarred from the pneumonia I had in January. And I was going to have to try to keep up with two much younger hikers, my friends Jack Thyen and Andy Kunkle.
But, like I said, it had been far too long since I’d hit the trails. You see? I didn’t really care how tough the hike was going to be. I was more concerned with getting back to my hobby and seeing a little bit of what the wild world has to offer. I can only live so long without walking through wilderness, and then I begin to lose focus. I have to have that contact with Mother Nature. There’s nothing else that does it for me, but hiking in the wild places.
I met up with Andy and his dog, Boone at a Wal-Mart parking lot in Gastonia. This is where we generally join forces to hit the mountains. This time, Andy and Boone hopped into my new truck and we left his car in the parking lot and headed to the Linville Gorge Wilderness Area where Jack Thyen was going to join us at the Pinch In Trailhead. We had a good time gabbing as we drove along and when we got to the trailhead, Jack soon found us.
We drove to the edge of the wilderness area via the Kistler Memorial Highway. Anyone reading the title on a map could actually confuse this with a real highway. It’s nothing like that. Kistler is a gravel one-lane road that hugs the eastern heights of the gorge and is a pretty rough Forest Service roadway. Currently, it’s in good repair and an auto can handle the terrain, but sometimes this is not the case, and in times like that I would suggest tackling it with a high clearance vehicle and four-wheel drive.
Once we’d met up with Jack I followed him in his Toyota Tacoma as we deposited his vehicle at the Conley Cove Trailhead a few miles down Kistler. Due to the nature of the hike, we needed a shuttle
to get back to my truck where we’d all embark. In short order we dropped off his vehicle and had returned to the Pinch In.
The Pinch In Trail is a very tough hike. It drops directly down into the gorge without benefit of switchbacks. It just follows the contours of a ridge and plummets right down toward the Linville River. The fires of 2007 hit this area really hard. These fires were particularly fierce. Sometimes a fire will just consume the dry underbrush and merely scorch a few leaves and darken some trunks. Not this fire. It came on the heels of a hideous drought that itself came on the heels of two other droughts. All of North Carolina was bone dry and the Linville Wilderness was a conflagration waiting for a spark.
Generally, some vegetation will survive even a strong fire. But not with this one. It even charred the rhododendron and mountain laurel. It swept down into coves. It turned the pines and oaks and poplars into jutting black sticks. This fire even burned up the soil! It burned all the way down to the carbonless mineral dirt. It was a really bad fire.
However…there is always something good that comes from such a disaster. In this case—and I mention this in complete selfishness as a human—it opened up the views and vistas of the gorge like nothing else. Where once you had hiked through obscuring vegetation, now you have unimpeded views of the peaks and canyons. The whole place has become geological eye candy.
It was cold, so we were bundled well in jackets, caps, gloves et cetera. And we headed down the Pinch In Trail, stopping often to take photos. The sky was overcast, in contrast to the reports all of us had read of clear skies and mild temperatures. We could only hope the various weathermen had been right and that the cloud cover would soon break.
In very short order, the trail dropped us a full two thousand feet down into the bottom of Linville Gorge. Fortunately, the fire had faded as it approached the river and so most of the tree cover down along the banks of the Linville is still green and vigorous. The hemlocks, of course, are all dying due to the adelgid infestation, but the rest of the trees seem to be in decent health.
Our first goal of the day was a place called Daffodil Flats. Only one family ever lived in the depths of the gorge and while almost all trace of their presence is long gone, there is still one thing to show that they once lived there:
Each Spring, thousands of yellow daffodils rise up to bloom in the flats where their little farm once stood. It seems a small thing as a destination, but somehow pleasing. All around you are forests and river and mountain ridges looming thousands of feet. And yet, here you hike to see a big patch of pretty flowers that lie so small and close to the earth.
We took photos here and then hiked back the way we’d come to a small beach and a very nice swimming hole on the Linville River. There, we had lunch. Boone, the eight-month-old dog had a blast kicking up the sand, and so we had to move back to eat our sandwiches and such as he filled the air with quartzite particles.
From there, we started back to the Pinch In Trail and began pushing up those same, steep slopes. We had to regain most of those two thousand feet we’d lost heading down and it was rough. I knew that it would be—especially as I’d had no real exercise over the past few months. Soon, my thighs and calves were screaming for mercy, but Dogback Mountain and Mr. Gravity were having none of that. I had to lag back and let my young companions blaze ahead while I huffed and puffed my way to the broken and burnt heights we’d left that morning.
Soon, though, we were back at around the 3,000-foot level on the rim of the gorge. Andy wanted to bushwhack cross country until we would hit the Rock Jock Trail. That trail had originally been blazed by rock climbers and scramblers, but the 2007 fire and disuse had mainly obliterated it. So the Forest Service had constructed a new Rock Jock route and that was where we were headed.
Trusting Andy’s route-finding skills, I followed him into the burnt and broken forest. The place was all dry and dead, and most of what was left of the trees and brush were carbonized. Everything I touched and everything that bumped against my legs and arms left charcoal smears. But Andy knew where he was going and after about half a mile we found ourselves on the Rock Jock Trail.
From there, we pushed on. This is easily the most scenic trail I’ve hiked in the gorge. Every few feet you have to stop and stare at the mountains. Far below lies the river, which you can hear crashing against boulders and flowing over vast rapids even from 2,000 feet above. The trail takes you to the very edge of high cliff faces where you can look down at hundreds of feet of empty air.
Coming to a place called Balanced Rock, I handed my camera to Jack and asked him to take some shots of me. As I stepped out onto the narrow top of the boulder, which seemed to hover over a vast drop off, I told him to snap three shots. That’s all that I felt I had the nerve for. However, by the time he took the second one, I yelled out, “Never mind the third! I’m getting the hell off of here!”
The Rock Jock Trail moves through a number of coves and over small creeks and cascades that tumble down into what was, before the fires, lush forests of hemlock and cove hardwoods. Now there is mainly just the tangle of dead underbrush and shattered rock making its way slide by slide to the river bottom. But it’s still all somehow beautiful. At one point, the trail hugs a rock overhang that serves as a strange little waterfall.
After some time of hiking at a good clip, we came to a great spot on the trail where the mountain fell away from us and the opposite side of the gorge was revealed in spectacular fashion. The air was clear and mild and so we stopped to take more photos. By this time my thighs were actually cramping. I had been afraid that I was actually going to run out of water, but as I dug through my pack for some salty food, I found another full bottle. Jack gave me some caffeine/aspirin concoction not unlike a tablet form of BC Powder which I chewed up and chased with a slug of water. The stuff worked well and the pain in my thighs and calves quickly eased off. Soon we were underway again.
At around 4:30 pm or so, we found that we’d come to the intersection with the Conley Cove Trail which we took to the parking lot and Jack’s truck. We had to pass a couple of sights toward the end of the hike. But that gives me ample reason to go back to seek them out. In the meantime, I’ve added Daffodil Flats and the Rock Jock Trail to the things that I’ve now seen in Linville Gorge Wilderness Area.
Random scenes along the Pinch In Trail and Rock Jock Trail.
This little pine was growing out of the top of a rock tower on the Pinch In Trail. I think it's a Table Mountain Pine.
Also taken on the Pinch In Trail, early in the morning when we first started the hike. The sky was overcast and it was quite chilly. Almost cold enough so that I was thinking of digging my gloves out of my backpack. This is a rock formation popular with rock climbers--might be one that they call "the Sphinx". Not sure.
The Sphinx, from Pinch In, but after the skies cleared and we were on our way up from the visit to Daffodil Flats.
Along the Rock Jock Trail you come to coves and side gorges with small streams and waterfalls. These were perfect habitat for hemlock groves before the adelgid started wiping them out. These areas were moist enough so that the fires in 2007 couldn't quite wipe out the vegetation in these spots. However, the hemlocks still died, but from aphid infestation.
The infested and dying hemlocks are beginning to fall over all around the gorge.
This little hemlock had succumbed, but is still holding on, dead though it is, to the rock atop which it had found purchase.
I never get tired of looking at the views of Table Rock and Hawksbill.
Telephoto shot of the summit of Table Rock Mountain.
This video was taken from the Rock Jock Trail not far from where it intersects with the Conley Cove Trail. Just wonderful views all along this section of that trail.
Jack Thyen on the left. Me and Boone the dog in the middle, Andy Kunkle on the right with his back turned. This was a great little beach and swimming hole along the Linville River. Just over the bank up in the trees is the best campsite I've yet seen in the gorge. I'll have to go back there in the summer and camp.
I took this one along the Rock Jock Trail. A lot of the trail travels through forests totally ravaged by the fires in 2007. These fires were so intense that they were able to even burn the rhododendron and consumed the peaty soil. It's going to take decades for the forest to recover from those fires.
Andy Kunkle and his dog, Boone in Split Rock along the Rock Jock Trail.
Remember the old saying about not looking down? I kept looking down and it freaked me out so much that I hauled ass off the balanced rock. It was just too scary. I'd asked Jack to take three photos of me on the overhang, but I chickened out as he took the third one.
Sometimes I can scarcely believe that I'm lucky enough to live in a state that has this kind of scenery. This is Table Rock Mountain as seen from Dogback Mountain. Believe it or not, you can actually walk to the summit of Table Rock. Doesn't look like it can be safely done, but the trail's not too bad, from what I've heard. I've yet to hike it.
This strange little waterfall was right beside the Rock Jock Trail. I was very thirsty at this point and feared running out of water (which always results in me getting severe leg cramps). I was tempted to drink deep here and save my bottled water, but one is always fearful of giardia and other microbes. So I passed. Alas!
Andy and I discuss camera batteries as I take a video of part of Daffodil Flats.
More tomorrow...
The Critter Philosopher
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Try it again and I swear on the very fabric of reality that I'll end you.
