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.

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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.

Friday Night Halfway - Back in Jackson. Lights Out!

It's been 5 weeks since we've done a Friday Night Halfway trip. The last one was to Jackson, California— and tonight we're in Jackson again! In fact it's not just Jackson we're staying in as our halfway point, but we're also headed tomorrow to the same all the way spot as 5 weeks ago. Tomorrow we'll drive up into the Carson Pass area of the Sierra Nevada mountains (which, BTW, are mostly in California, nephew) to hike to The Nipple again. Five weeks ago we only got partway there due to tough weather.

The drive out here was similar to last time. It's just 120 miles from home and it should have taken just over 2 hours to drive. Instead it took over 3 hours because of rush-hour traffic. Yeah, we knew we'd hit traffic snags leaving at 5pm. But I didn't sweat it because we were able to leave at 5pm. That's one of the nice things about working from home.... When we want to get out of town on a Friday night, we don't have to commute home from the office, then pack, then leave. We can throw together our bags during a short break (it doesn't take us more than about 10 minutes to pack for a simple overnight and a hiking day) and then leave when the workday's done.

This trip isn't exactly a do-over of 5 weeks ago. One thing that's different is we're staying in a different hotel. 😅  Tonight we're at a Holiday Inn Express instead of a Best Western. It's not that the BW was a bad hotel. I mean, okay, it did feel a bit slummy, but we've stayed in worse. But I would have stayed here again tonight— except that it was booked up!  And I wish that it wasn't, because when we arrived at the HIX just after 9pm it was in a blackout.

The front desk person explained that there was an accident nearby about 45 minutes earlier that knocked out power to about a quarter of this small town. Indeed we saw flashing lights of emergency vehicles a block down the road. We don't know when the power will be back on.

Thankfully the batteries on our devices are mostly charged. We have backup power banks, too. And since we've got our hiking gear, we've got dedicated flashlights as well. And at least the weather's neither oppressive nor chilly this evening, so we're fine without AC or heat.

Update, 10pm: The power came back on a few minutes ago. We'd been in the dark for about 40 minutes. Surprisingly it wasn't that bothersome. We just stretched out in the room with our electronics. The cell network was still working fine to provide us data.