Mountain Hiking

DuPont State Forest

Early one morning, I walked past Fawn Lake, a bright, rippled surface against brushy banks and under wooded hills, everything in varying shades of green, and I thought a little about the huge trophy homes that might have been tucked into those slopes.  For the DuPont State Forest, located in Transylvania and Henderson Counties, N.C., is a new one, having been an industrial site for many years and acquired by the state only between 1995 and 2000.  The 10,300 acres of woods and streams served as an ideal site for clean manufacturing processes and exclusive employee recreation.  Part of the tract, rich in waterfalls, was sold to a developer who planned to put in a high-end gated community, and this plan was stopped at the last minute when the state invoked its power of eminent domain.  Every now and then, a conservation effort will actually succeed. 

As I walked, it surely was clear that this was an eastern forest; unlike in almost every way the Rocky Mountain forests that I have come to think of as home.  The woods were thick, the trees close together, and the foliage dense and dark.  The trails were like green tunnels, with only small and scattered views of the sky. The light was dim and green.

The air was close, too.  At an altitude of only 2 to 3000 ft., air molecules were crowded together, and humid water molecules made me want to push the air out of my way, almost swim through a kind of soup of air.  It was damp and heavy. The vegetation was damp, the ground, my skin…

There was a soft lushness all around.  The old, old land was softly contoured, gently rolling.  There were few rocks in the trail, no boulders, spires, or crags—no sharp edges or angles.  The soil was soft and spongy with deep leaf and needle accumulation.  Fleshy toadstools reached up.  There were carpets of moss and blankets of ferns that gave an extra layer of softness to the trees and the land.  The forest was full and soft and cushioned. 

Mourning Doves called, and songbirds twittered and sang.  A woodpecker gave a raucous bray.  Rhododendron and laurel and native azalea were in pink and white bloom.  I paused at a rich patchwork of light and color, where the sun glinted on tiny oak leaves, forming bright white highlights among light green leaves, darker green in the shadows, and still darker mosses against the almost black roughness of branches and trunks. 

As I walked and turned from one trail to another in this great labyrinth of trails, it was easy to forget that many of these “trails” were once functional roads that connected farms and communities.  Once upon a time, farm carts and maybe Model T’s bounced this way and carried folk to market, to church, to friends…  As I followed my trail map, I repeatedly came upon tracks that diverged from my path but that were not on the map.  There are almost 100 miles of trails in this network, but there are still more old trails and roads that have not been “officially” included.  It was a little humbling to think of all the activity that had gone on before. 

I awoke from my musings as eight horses slowly walked past, seven young girls and one woman bringing up the rear.  On a later trail, I walked in quiet solitude, and an entire herd of cross-country runners gradually streamed by.  The first were animated and talking to one another about other runs.  The later ones were quiet and breathing hard.  They made me think back to my students, whom I had led through woods very like these, in a part of South Carolina where hiking and camping were not forms of recreation unless they were part of a deer hunt.  I had gotten quite a kick out of introducing them to high, wild places.  One day, as we came down a mountain path, one said to me, “My grandma will not believe where I’ve been!” 

Of course, the most exciting features of the DuPont forest are the rivers, the shoals, and the waterfalls.  The smooth undulations of the well-clothed landscape are indeed broken now and then. I first came to Bridal Veil Falls on the Little River.  Yes, the water had uncovered the bones of the earth, great gray, tan, and faintly reddish brown slabs of granite, but even here, the rock was worn smooth, and the water flowed in clean, soft sheets over the tilted surfaces and slid gently into quiet pools.  There were a few ledges that broke the surface and created splashes and dancing streams, but the overall feeling was still soft and quiet. 

I climbed the rounded rock surface beside the sloped falls.  At the top, I found the initial drop of Bridal Veil, a ten-foot slide and then a four-foot vertical drop, about 30 feet wide.  Here was something a little less soft—a sharp edge, churning water, a roar with a bit of strength to it. 

I retraced my steps to the base of the falls, back up the trail, and then up Bridal Overlook Trail.  From a high point, I could see the smooth rock bed of the creek, a rounded granite cliff set into the wooded slopes of the opposite valley wall, and miles of rolling undulating treetops, into the misty distance. 

Hooker Falls is about ten feet high and 60 feet wide.  The water tumbles into boiling, bright-white foam and sends a stream of mist shooting horizontally over the surface of the pool.  A trout jumped, exposing a shiny wet back. 

The Galax Trail took me steeply up to Triple Falls, a series of three drops, each pouring into its own pool, and totaling about 120 feet.  I climbed down to the top of the lower falls and then about halfway down the adjacent ledges.  The rocky bed sloped at about 45º and whipped the water into a white and tumbling froth.  The middle drop was about 20 feet high and a steeper fall into a broad pool contained in a shallow, rock basin.  Here was a place to spread your towel on the smooth rock and alternately bathe in the warm air, spiced with misty blasts from the falls, and then in the cold water of the basin. 

The upper falls plunged about 15 feet in two, almost vertical drops.  Again, the white, foamy water shone in the sun and roared with power.  I climbed to the top and looked out over the lip.  None of the falling water was visible from this perspective, but the valley fell away, a solid rock-cut in the thick, green forest slope. 

Finally, High Falls was the highest in the area, a great mound of rock 150 feet tall, with water flowing over its ledgey surface in great sheets of frothy white.  At one point, the water hit a jutting rock and sent a sparkling ponytail arcing outward.  A man in a bathing suit sat under one of the streams, as under a super-shower.  His wife took his picture.