Monday, May 25, 2015

May 25 – Roaring Fork and Crabtree Falls

It’s been TWO WHOLE DAYS without a waterfall. How did we survive? To fix that we drove up to two more, a bit farther north, near the Blue Ridge Parkway.

First up was Roaring Fork Falls. It is a very easy 1 mile return walk on a wide, flat dirt road.

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The falls are 100 feet tall and staircase down a narrow gully.

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It was not too busy but we never had the falls to ourselves.

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You couldn’t get very many different views because it was so narrow and you could only climb a very short way up.

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On looking at the pictures, this was another place where the images just don’t do the place justice. The falls were much more impressive in person.

After a short drive we arrived at the Crabtree Falls trailhead. The hike is just over 2 miles round trip and unfortunately drops 500 vertical feet on the way in.

The first section was wide open and sunny.

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Then into some shade and a smooth downhill zigzag.

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They made the sections of the zigzag less steep by putting stairs at the corners.

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The last section before the falls was quite rough with lots of large loose stones.

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Crabtree Falls are 60 feet high and starts from a narrow stream at the top and then fans out in many cascades over a wide rock face. It has a nice pool at the bottom and is well framed by the trees. It is just about my idea of a perfect waterfall.

I wish we could have gotten here earlier because the sun was already making it hard to capture any detail in the lit sections. I had decided to do Roaring Fork first because I was pretty sure that if we did Crabtree first we would be too tired and would have skipped Roaring Fork.

Lets just say that a lot of Photoshop and HDR went into these pictures. Still not very good.

Our lunch spot.

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Here is one as it came out of the camera. There is no detail in the sunlit section.

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This is the best I could with my limited skills. I really should take a photography course.

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Early morning or evening would have been so much better..

It was always busy here and lots of people had a dog or three.

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Everybody into the pool.

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And one with the water blurred.

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We sat around enjoying the view for almost an hour and a half before starting the climb back to the car. If we lived around here, we would certainly come back.

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1 comment:

  1. You really are becoming the master of the waterfall picture! Beautiful!!!

    ReplyDelete