High Knob / Cascade Falls
Driving from Norton, VA to Wilmington, NC | High Knob Recreation Area | Cascade Falls on the Blue Ridge Parkway | Uwharrie National Forest | July 2023
We began our morning in Virginia with driving up to the top of High Knob and walking up to the tower. There was decent visibility of the mountains all around us, with clouds filling in the valleys; the walkway was overgrown with wildflowers and buzzing with bees. We enjoyed being all alone at the tower, then made breakfast in the van and continued on our drive.
For today’s drive, we took Alt-US 58 East to Damascus, then cut off the corner of Tennessee before entering North Carolina on US-421. Thanks to taking different routes every time we travel to NC, we are slowly filling out our county map for the so many of Appalachian States. Today’s drive helped us to fill a few holes while also avoiding the bigger cities and traffic.
As a fun activity for the day, we took a short detour on the Blue Ridge Parkway East of Boone, NC to hike the trail to Cascade Falls. Both the Parkway and the trail were lined with rhododendron in full bloom; a stark contrast to how it looked the last time we were here in January! The trail was fairly busy, but Charlotte did great making her way down the trail. After we crossed the stream, Curtis and I took turns going to see the waterfall since there were lots of steps and it was pretty muddy. Unfortunately, the lower viewing area was closed so we could only see the upper part of the falls, and like most waterfalls this one would probably look much more impressive from below. We enjoyed seeing the falls nonetheless, but the flowers were the real highlight of the hike!
We enjoyed a picnic in the shade after completing our hike. And with that, it was already time to say goodbye to the mountains for now, as we had to finish our drive to the coast. We always love driving the Blue Ridge Parkway, and started talking about how we could possibly fit it into our return trip. Driving the road in our van/home just adds to the laid back, relaxed feel the Parkway gives, when we can pull into any lookout, take a break, have a snack, and enjoy the refreshing mountain air.
We returned to US-421, then skirted around Winston-Salem, getting several new counties and avoiding the city traffic. We ultimately took US-64 East just past Lexington, and finished today’s drive by going South into Uwharrie National Forest. Since we couldn’t check into our hotel in Wilmington until the next day, we decided to return to the campground where Curtis had stayed last December when backpacking through the area. It would leave us with a very short drive the next day so we could take our time getting up, take more back roads to get even more counties, and still make it with plenty of time to pick up a rental car and settle in before Curtis started training on Monday.
As we entered Uwharrie, it started to downpour, but let up a bit after we arrived at the campground. That helped to bring the humidity down, so we were able to enjoy a short evening walk around the empty campground with Charlotte. The highlights of this campground were all the cute tiny mushrooms scattered around everywhere!
