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.

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

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

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

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.

Then into some shade and a smooth downhill zigzag.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Everybody into the pool.

And one with the water blurred.

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.