Waterfalls of DuPont State Forest

The Little River provides beautiful scenery for many of the trails and falls in DuPont State Forest.

From  downtown Brevard NC, we traveled on a new route to me, to find waterfalls that I'd visited several years ago coming from the other direction.  Could we do it?

The map on the wall in downtown Brevard shows a relatively straight road over rough terrain, obviously misleading! It climbed in elevation and did enough switch-backing that some motorcycles were very happy when we pulled over to let everyone behind us pass our "slow moving vehicle."
I was relieved since we were enjoying looking at the little river by the highway.

We followed one direct road which turned into a gravel road (for the next 5 miles) so we turned around and went looking for the visitor's center on another road.  Instead we found a large parking lot for the High Falls trail, and a large building named for someone (sorry, I don't remember who that was) and only by process of elimination we figured it must have been the Visitor's Center.

By then we went on down the second road which went directly to Hooker Falls, where we found the shorter and easier trail that we were interested in.  It had been improved since I was there about 4-5 years ago. And a new pedestrian bridge leads across the Little River to help hikers go to the Triple Falls Trail.

Going down a gravel path to Hooker Falls is a gentle slope along the river.  I was happy to see how dry and warm the going was, considering there had been heavy rain all day Monday (this was Wednesday.)

There was plenty of white water, moving pretty fast. But the banks didn't show that it was at all high from the streambed.

Hooker Falls.

Yes there is a young barefoot man in yellow swim trunks standing at the foot of the falls on one of the flat shelves of rock.

He went twice under part of the falls, but came out in a few minutes.  There are quite a few shelves of flat rock, mostly under water.  We left before he did!

After enjoying seeing some dogwood in bloom (it was 80 degrees that afternoon) I finally found a patch of Galax at the base of this tree, which I remembered seeing on my first visit.

 It's illegal to cut or dig it up in this area.

We stood on the pedestrian bridge and looked upstream where the road crosses the river where there's a little island.

Looking downstream from the bridge we agreed this wasn't a river to go tubing down.  A bit too fast and bumpy!

Today's quote:

Are the stars too distant? Pick up the pebble that lies at thy feet, and from it learn the all.

Margaret Fuller