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To Drift Falls and Back
Oct. 11th, 2023 06:56 amNorth Carolina Travelog #29
Gorges State Park, NC - Sat, 23 Sep 2023. 3pm
The Rainbow Falls trail connects three waterfalls at Gorges State Park in North Carolina. Oddly, though, none of these falls are in the park. Rainbow Falls and Turtleback Falls are in the adjoining Pisgah National Forest, and the third falls, Drift Falls, is actually on private property.
Drift Falls isn't far upstream from Turtleback Falls. Traffic on the trail dropped off markedly, though. I wonder if that's because some maps don't indicate that there's another falls here. Whatever the case, we enjoyed having this end of the trail almost entirely to ourselves.
The trail ends about 50 feet shy of where we're standing to take pics like the one above. We hopped out across some rocks to get in the middle of the river. We're pretty much at the private property boundary here. (The boundary cuts across the river just below the falls.)
After enjoy Drift Falls in relative peace and quiet for a while we started retracing our steps the trailhead. The trail got busy again as we passed Turtleback Falls, then very busy as we clambered down past Rainbow Falls. It's good that we started relatively early in the morning. Not only was the trail less crowded then but the parking lot was, too. The lot was a bit over half full when we parked. When we returned to our car we saw it had hit overflow stage at some point, causing people to park up to 1/2 mile away and have to walk in.
Gorges State Park, NC - Sat, 23 Sep 2023. 3pm
The Rainbow Falls trail connects three waterfalls at Gorges State Park in North Carolina. Oddly, though, none of these falls are in the park. Rainbow Falls and Turtleback Falls are in the adjoining Pisgah National Forest, and the third falls, Drift Falls, is actually on private property.
Drift Falls isn't far upstream from Turtleback Falls. Traffic on the trail dropped off markedly, though. I wonder if that's because some maps don't indicate that there's another falls here. Whatever the case, we enjoyed having this end of the trail almost entirely to ourselves.
The trail ends about 50 feet shy of where we're standing to take pics like the one above. We hopped out across some rocks to get in the middle of the river. We're pretty much at the private property boundary here. (The boundary cuts across the river just below the falls.)
After enjoy Drift Falls in relative peace and quiet for a while we started retracing our steps the trailhead. The trail got busy again as we passed Turtleback Falls, then very busy as we clambered down past Rainbow Falls. It's good that we started relatively early in the morning. Not only was the trail less crowded then but the parking lot was, too. The lot was a bit over half full when we parked. When we returned to our car we saw it had hit overflow stage at some point, causing people to park up to 1/2 mile away and have to walk in.
