Waterfall 100 Challenge: Wintergreen Falls – 9/28/22 - 10.7 Miles
My husband is a very agreeable guy. How many exploratory hiking trips has he said “yes” to? Here we go on another waterfall escapade…or two…on my list.
We made a rare mid-week excursion to get ahead of Hurricane Ian passing through western North Carolina, and booked an Airbnb in Brevard, a great home base to access hundreds (yes, hundreds) of waterfalls in western North Carolina.
First up: Wintergreen Falls, deep in Gorges State Park (not the one in DuPont State Forest!)
I can only surmise that this waterfall has been on Carolina Mountain Club's WC100 Challenge list for years prior to the closing of Auger Hole Road. What used to be a 4-mile round trip hike is now 10+ miles, and my guess is that visitation has dropped dramatically over the years. [Note: Jim was not feeling well, endured this hike with a grimace, but he did it! My hero.]
The hike reports I’ve read about Wintergreen Falls are intimidating, some successful, some not. What begins as an easy hike on an old forest road becomes a very difficult bushwhack. My favorite trip report person writes here about his hike some years ago.
“Auger Hole Trail was once a road, so maybe we could speed this whole thing up by biking it,” said the naïve person (me) with a vested interest in completing the hike. You can't determine the condition of an old forest road until you get on it, but the elevation change didn’t look too bad - just 3 miles on Auger Hole to connect to the Wintergreen Trail! We parked at the trailhead, saddled up and hit the trail.
Fortunately, this was the only bridge. The condition of the road wasn’t bad, no serious blowdowns or potholes, but who was I kidding? Jim is a cycling machine and can power through any terrain, but the elevation changes were more than I could manage consistently. (In my defense, we were loaded down with daypacks and hiking poles.) After about 1.5 miles of me walking my bike up the steeper hills, we decided to continue on foot.
and walked the next 2 miles on Auger Hole Trail.
Now that we're on foot, let's look at some fall flowers.
Where Auger Hole Trail continues straight to cross the Toxaway River, we took a right turn onto Wintergreen Trail, a narrower old forest road. The name is misleading, as the trail doesn’t go to the waterfall, but stops at the Wintergreen campsite. It’s a nice destination, two spaces w/ picnic tables and fire rings. A few steps beyond is the Toxaway River again.
Knowing that we would be doing some bushwhacking, we should have left our hiking poles at the campsite but it's hard to break that habit. From this point I had no GPS track, only some notes to help us. [I was creating a GAIA track.]
For the most part, I could not see the trail but could sense it – until I couldn’t even do that. The vegetation was beginning to die back, but so much of the foliage was rhododendron and mountain laurel (which doesn’t die back) that we were feeling our way intuitively most of the time. I knew enough to keep the river on our left side and walk upstream, but I was not willing to walk in the water like some have done.
At one point a huge boulder outcropping came close to a sheer edge and we had to scramble up and over and around it. I’d read about this in others’ writings so was not surprised and actually felt some assurance at being on track.
We reached Panther Branch (yay!), easy enough to rock hop across. We followed a brief series of faded pink flagging tape that abruptly ended. The faint trail seemed to continue rising until we reached a point where we were stumped. Had we wandered toward some dead end that others had also followed? We retraced our steps, but the only way forward was incredibly steep down in the direction of the river, nothing to hold onto. Once I slid so far down that I stopped only by putting my feet out to hit the trunk of a tree.
Jim and I sat there for some time, debating our options. I thought I could hear big water, maybe Wintergreen Falls, but we were probably about a quarter of a mile away. Looking at the GAIA track later, it appeared that we progressed about a quarter of a mile from the Panther Branch crossing in 1.5 hours.
Ultimately we decided that neither of us had the skills to go forward, and we turned around. The return to the campsite seemed short (20 minutes?) From there it was 3.5 miles back to the bikes, and 1.5 miles getting the bikes back to the car. Jim was able to ride his, while I rode some and pushed some. This was my physical low point, tired from the bushwhacking.
I was extremely disappointed not to reach Wintergreen Falls, but we had made our very best effort and safety is the most important thing.
We drove back to Brevard, had no energy for eating dinner out, so we hit up Ingles for provisions and found our little Airbnb. Somehow I had missed the detail that it only had portable heaters, but the chilly night was great for sleeping after a long adventure in the woods. Tomorrow is another day!
“A river doesn’t just carry water, it carries life.” ~Amit Kalantri
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