Monday, July 20, 2015

The Summer of Waterfalls: third installment

 Stan and Robin were kind enough to invite us to stay with them for the weekend in Highlands, NC recently.  Stan was one of my college roommates and we have drafted him for some of our waterfall adventures in his home county this summer.  There's a ton of waterfalls near Highlands, so our crew of waterfall finders were happy to go.


 After a couple of laps around Mirror Lake on the paddle boat, we tried out the new BBQ restaurant in town where we all got to draw on the tables.  They only brought two packs of crayons for the kids...I don't think they realized they had a whole table of artists on their hands.  


We sniffed out the ice cream place in town and sat out in the very comfortable temperatures to hear the local dulcimer group play a few songs.


 The next morning we headed out to drive under Bridal Veil Falls.  G got out and took this photo of us parked under the waterfall.  


 This is the photo I was taking from inside the Jeep.


 Just a bit down the road was probably my favorite waterfall of the summer so far...Dry Falls.  It's hard to get a sense of the scale of these things in photos but under the waterfall there's a walkway.


 This is the view from directly behind the waterfall.


Such a powerful waterfall and so great to be able to walk right behind it.


 The walkway continues around in a horseshoe to the other side for this view.


 Next we drove up to Glen Falls, a series of three different waterfalls on the same mountain.  This is Upper Glen Falls.  Stan, Blue, G and Violet all went with me to view this one.


 From the top, it was a steep hike down a rough trail to the next one, Middle Glen Falls.  Violet was the only one willing to brave it with me.


 We couldn't resist the chance to see the last one while we were there.  Violet assured me she was up for the challenge so we climbed on down to the bottom of the trail for a view of the smaller, less impressive Lower Glen Falls.  Then we had to climb all the way back up the mountain.  Violet did great and climbed like a champ.

 On our way back to SC, we stopped to add one more waterfall to our list.  This is Silver Run Falls and it was a pretty good one.  A very short, flat walk from the road to a great swimming hole.  


 The spider monkey kids love climbing on rocks and we were able to jump rocks all the way around to both sides of this one.  

These beauties put our waterfall total at 21.

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