Archive for April, 2013

Greene Mtn. Trail & Camp Creek Falls – 3-30-2013

Ever since my last trip to Camp Creek Falls in Greene County, I had wanted to find the Camp Creek Trail to see if it still existed. Since it is hard to find at the bottom due to it beginning on private property, I thought maybe it would be a good idea if we could locate it from the top of Green Mountain. We had been wanting to explore that area anyway as it has been many years since we left any bootprints there. My friend Bol’Dar and I left Hairnt Quarters after 10am getting our usual late start and took the fairly long drive around to Viking Mountain Road which leads up to Viking Mountain / Jones Meadows / Camp Creek Bald where we planned to park at the gate to a forest road that is labeled as ‘Green Mountain Trail’. This is located about halfway up just before Low Gap in the sharp switchback of the road but we could not make it to this point due to the snow and ice covered road so we ended up parking and walking an extra mile to get there. That mile is mostly uphill but it was a good warmer upper for a chilly morning.  From the gate it was mostly level for about two miles over to the Kennedy Cabin area. It is important to know that there is a a lot of trail and road intersections to be encountered here and many are not on any maps so, you will need a good sense of direction and some knowledge of the area to negotiate these successfully. Following the old forest road, the first major intersection you will come to is where the Bullen Hollow trail comes in from Low Gap. If you go off the main road and walk up to that intersection from the split, you will see where FR358 goes on the other side of the ridge and down towards Bullen Hollow and you will have views of Viking Mountain and Blackstack Cliffs from this point. There was a few inches of snow mostly on the shaded North slopes but it was not deep enough to make hiking difficult and actually gave some contrast to the mountain views to make things more visible.

grassy field

View of Viking Mountain from the grassy fields near Kennedy Cabin area

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Posted on 19 April '13 by , under RATtreks. 1 Comment.

DuPont Forest Waterfalls – 3-27-2013

For years I have heard about the ‘Land of the Waterfalls’ in Transylvania County of North Carolina (called this due to some 250 different waterfalls located there),  some of them are located in the DuPont State Forest. It is  also called ‘Home of the White Squirrel‘ (as they actually do have white squirrels there !) and I finally got to take my first trip there on Wednesday, March 27, 2013. My waterfall crazy friend Dave Aldridge invited me along on an exploration trip he had planned to find an unnamed and unlisted waterfall within the DuPont State Forest that he had found by looking at a satellite view of the area. He had discovered a way down to the top of them the week before, but was unable to get down to the bottom of them so it was our quest to find a way there. Dave knew that these unknown falls were just above a very well known and listed falls called Wintergreen Falls so we took what we thought would be an easier route to those falls and then looked for a passable route to get upstream to the falls we were searching for. Having seen an old road trail on the map, we easily found that and parked at a locked gate there and proceeded down this nice road trail towards the Wintergreen Falls. It is about a mile and a half to these falls by this route. There is a short rock hop to reach them. They are only about 20 feet high so they are the least impressive falls within the park but they are nice and besides, we were in search of a much larger one upstream from there.

wintergreen falls

Wintergreen Falls (Photo by Dave Aldridge)

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Posted on 5 April '13 by , under RATtreks. No Comments.