Linville Falls / Hiking Table Rock
Rock Creek Recreation Area, TN to Linville Gorge, NC | Hiking to Linville Falls Overlook | Hiking Table Rock and the Chimneys from Spence Ridge | Camping in Linville Gorge Wilderness | May 2024
This morning, we packed up our site in Rock Creek and made the drive back up to the ridge, officially entering North Carolina. The plan for the day was to do some hiking around Linville Falls & Linville Gorge, and camp somewhere in the wilderness. It took an hour and a half to get to that area, mostly driving on county roads through the mountains, a route we hadn’t taken before.
When we reached Linville Falls, the area was busier than we expected, and realizing that it was a Friday, hoped we wouldn’t have trouble finding a place to camp. We navigated to the Linville Falls Trailhead off of NC-183, and prepared for a hike. The weather was cool, the trail was considered easy and well maintained, and it would be less than 2 miles — all the perfect conditions for Charlotte to hike. And she did such a great job on this trail — sure, we stopped a lot so she could sniff, but she deserves it.
The trailhead was pretty busy, but most of the people were at the different lookouts and it didn’t feel crowded when we were hiking between those. The biggest downside that comes from these types of areas is how everyone feels the need to point out how old Charlotte looks. Those comments get old really fast, and it took some restraint to not turn the comments around on those people because most of them weren’t that young themselves. We did have a pleasant conversation with a woman who actually noticed that Char didn’t have eyes. It turned out that she had glaucoma as well, so we talked about our experiences with it and the differences between the disease in dogs versus people. One of the biggest differences between her and Charlotte was that she, as a person, could understand that the eye drops are for her benefit, while Charlotte only ever thought of it as us torturing her.
Besides all the comments, the hike was easy and very pleasant. The mountain laurels were everywhere along the trails, which again was the real highlight for me. We decided to bypass the spur to the Upper Falls lookout and instead went for the Chimney View, which was .7 miles from the trailhead. The lookout turned out to be down a staircase followed by rock steps, so Curtis and I took turns going down while the other waited at the top with Char. This was where we ran into the most people, including a group of 20+ seniors as we were leaving. That’s when we decided that one lookout was good enough, and made our way back to the van. Altogether our hike was 1.5 mies, and you can see our AllTrails recording here.
After that, we were ready to drive off into the wilderness and not see any more people for today. We drove to the Linville Gorge Wilderness, which has some specific rules about camping, especially on weekends, but as far as we could tell we were allowed to stay for one night in a designated pull out. We found one that was about 9 miles down the road, which was rough but didn’t require four wheel drive (which is good because we don’t have that). The spot wasn’t level and had a weird angle that made backing out difficult, but somehow we had cell service with our signal booster so it wasn’t all bad. After we enjoyed lunch at the site, Curtis went off on his own to do a longer hike that started nearby.
Curtis: After my mistaken peak identity mishap the day before, I felt the need to prove myself and actually bag a peak towards my prominence goal (it was almost June after all, and I was only at 3 peaks for the year, far below my 2 per month benchmark to stay on track). Fortunately, nearby was Table Rock, a bald summit along the West rim of Linville Gorge. I got started on the Spence Ridge trail, which despite its name, actually followed a gulley down into the gorge, but I soon met up with a separate trail that went steeply up the North ridge of the mountain. It was hot and sweaty cardio without any viewpoints, but I pushed myself to near the summit area where I was finally rewarded with sweeping views of the gorge. Rather than go straight to the summit, I decided to follow the rim of the gorge heading South on the Mountains to Sea Trail to some rocky cliffs. There I got views not just of the gorge, but of my chosen peak, and even out onto the piedmont.
I eventually turned around and then made it to the actual peak where I wandered around for quite sometime looking for antique and missing letterboxes. The weather was nice and the views quite good, giving glimpses of a stormy and cloud covered Mount Mitchell. There was a steady stream of other day hikers who, instead of taking the long and steep trail I had traversed, drove most of the way up. In hindsight we could have reasonably driven the van to the final parking lot and had a more scenic (and flatter) spot for the night. But you live and you learn.
I did suffer one casualty at the summit when the seam of my shorts split down the middle. This wouldn’t normally be noteworthy, but it was the 3rd time this had happened (to three separate pairs of pants/shorts I might add) in less than a month and so was particularly vexing. Otherwise my trip back followed the MST down to the access road which I followed back to the van for successful summit, redeeming myself somewhat in my eyes. You can see my AllTrails recording for this hike here. Once I returned, we had dinner and settled in for a quiet night in the wilderness.
