After our last hiking adventure, we wanted our next hike to be something simple and easy. Our schedule on New Year’s Day didn’t allow for anything terribly ambitious, so it was a good opportunity to visit one of the most kid-friendly short hikes in the area — the Andy Cove Nature Trail in the Pisgah National Forest. Andy Cove is a dent in the side of Little Hickory Knob, draining the south side into a little feeder stream into the Davidson River.
This 0.7 mile trail, despite its diminutive length, has a pedigree. It’s a National Recreation Trail and a Kids in Parks TRACKS trail, built by the Youth Conservation Corps. Though it’s not ADA-compliant, the trail’s elevation changes are minimal and well within the capabilities of preschool-aged kiddos.
The starting location for this hike is behind the Pisgah National Forest Ranger Station/visitor center (1600 Pisgah Highway, aka U.S. Highway 276, Pisgah Forest NC). Since it’s a loop trail, there are actually two trailheads. Most folks start at the easternmost trailhead, which is at the western end of the main parking area, in the woods between the parking area and the visitor center. The visitor center, with restrooms, is open year-round. Signs abound to make the trail easy to spot.
A kid-friendly short trail has to pack in the attractions, though in truth you don’t need a lot to keep the littlest ones occupied with an abounding assortment of rocks and sticks available. Almost immediately upon entering the woods on a nice dirt footbed, we noticed little corrugated plastic signs representing the local wildlife that might be spotted on the trail, or more likely, deeper into the Pisgah National Forest. We were there in the winter, so the cardboard critters were the only fauna we noticed.
Minutes afterward, we came to the first of three or four wooden staircases that are on the loop. None were particularly tall and they were all sturdy, but I mention them in case you were thinking of taking a stroller on this hike. After a brief uphill climb, the trail levels out, with an observation deck to one side overlooking the woods and nearby Pisgah Highway. At this point the nature of the trail changes quite a bit, as the footbed switches from dirt to an elevated boardwalk.
After a brief jaunt on the boardwalk, the trail winds around to the left and there is the glory of the Andy Cove trail, a swinging bridge! You’ll swap the comfort of the too, too solid earth for swaying gently over a drainage of Little Hickory Knob. The bridge is about 40 yards long and around 6 feet wide, with cable handrails on each side.
After crossing the bridge, the footbed is again a dirt path, winding gently along the west side of the drainage. A set of steps helps with one of the steeper declines, and the trail crosses a small feeder creek on a nice wide footbridge. The trail gradually loses elevation over its last half, with the exception of two short staircases, and follows the creek until it eventually crosses it on another wide footbridge. There’s access to the creek here, so this would be another spot to tarry, especially on a hot day. There were some kids playing in the creek as we passed, so even on a cool day it’s a good place to explore as the creek is only inches deep and flows gently here.
Shortly after the creek crossing, the Andy Cove Nature Trail tees into the Exercise Trail, a mostly flat 1.5 mile gravel trail that loops around the north and south sides of the Davidson River. We turned left and were back at the visitor center about 100 yards later.
Not every hike has to be a long one. If you’re looking for a short, fairly easy hike with a couple of points of interest, this is a good option. As an introduction to hiking, this is probably one of the best local trails for very young children, and it is by far the easiest access to a swinging bridge in the immediate area. The trails at the Cradle of Forestry are another great option for kids’ hikes, though the Cradle is only open April-November and charges a modest admission fee (well worth it). We didn’t hike Andy Cove when there was any wildflower activity, but given its vicinity to a creek it’s a good bet it would have some wildflowers. Given its proximity to the visitor center and low degree of difficulty, it’s also a good bet that this trail sees lots of use, especially during warmer weather, so if solitude is your thing you’ll want to give this one a pass.
This hike was a good way to ease into 2023, and it will be a good way to ease into hiking for nearly anyone if you’re new to the outdoors or if you’ve been out of the hiking game for a few years.
My apologies to anyone who got the reference in the first part of this post’s title, as you no doubt have a soundtrack of adolescent sniggering now playing in the back of your brain. For those of you who didn’t get it, it’s a nod to a catchphrase from MTV’s notorious animated series Beavis and Butt-Head. If you’ve never seen it, count yourself lucky. I thought it was astoundingly stupid when it debuted in 1993. I can’t say I’ve been a regular watcher of the show, but I’ve come to appreciate the satire and social commentary intended by the show’s creator, Mike Judge.
The show centers around two teenage boys who, as Rolling Stone put it, mostly watch heavy metal music videos and go on “mundane, sordid” adventures. Throughout each episode, the characters offer alternately insipid and suggestive dialog, punctuated by continual sniggering at their own jokes, which they don’t even understand. Beavis frequently transforms into an alter ego he calls “The Great Cornholio” whenever he overdoses on caffeine or sugar, during which he pulls his hoodie up over his head and pretty much turns into a raving lunatic.
This is not a television blog, so thanks for sticking with me up to now. This post is about an outing by two 60-somethings, who despite knowing better, turned a routine hike into an adventure though a series of stupid mistakes. Don’t fret — it all turns out fine, but I made an art form out of overthinking and underthinking on this one.
We were really keen to get in a hike prior to Christmas, as we had been caught up in the usual holiday frenzy and needed some outside time. A small window opened in our schedules, along with clear but cool weather after a series of rainy days. I had my eye on a return to Graveyard Fields up in the Pisgah National Forest, where we had previously done part of a loop hike but bailed early due to threatening weather. There’s a waterfall we didn’t get to on that hike, and with the recent rain there would probably be great flow.
However, the rainy stretch had been followed by a cold snap. Though we had stayed ice and snow-free down in Brevard, Graveyard Fields is at a higher elevation, just off the Blue Ridge Parkway. The National Park Service is quick to snap the gates closed on the BRP when it’s icy, so I checked their road conditions web page the day before the hike. It appeared that the stretch including Graveyard Fields was open, but on the eve of our hike below-freezing temperatures were in the forecast. The webpage said it would be updated by 10 am the next day, and since this would be a relatively short hike, close to home, we decided to wait until after 10 to head out, after taking a final check of the road conditions website.
So we slept in and made a leisurely start to the day. I checked the BRP road conditions website at 10 am — no update. Checked again at 10:30 — no update. By 11 am, I made one final check and still no update. At this point, given the uncertainty, we decided to go for a Plan B hike in the nearby DuPont State Forest. There’s still quite a bit of DuPont that we haven’t visited, and the Corn Mill Shoals area is one such example, so I took a quick peek at AllTrails to see if there were any recent problems noted there. I quickly plotted out (mentally) a loop hike that would take us along Big Rock, up Cedar Rock, along the Little River, and back to the trailhead. I then remembered I had downloaded an Avenza map for DuPont onto my phone, so we’d have an excellent GPS-enabled map to track our progress. It would be about 3.6 miles, a nice amble.
The weather, however, posed a bit of a puzzler. It was pretty cold, in the mid-30s, and in that awkward zone where it’s too cold to wear our “technical” bottoms (lightweight, quick-drying trousers), but too warm to go with insulated ski pants. So against our usual practice, we donned jeans for relative warmth and comfort. The map did indicate a couple of creek crossings, but these are usually small or bridged in DuPont, so we didn’t expect to do any wading. We rushed out of the house, to make sure we’d have time to complete the walk well before dark.
The drive to the Corn Mill Shoals parking area was uneventful, and there was only one other car in the large gravel parking area off Cascade Lake Road. I should mention this was at mid-day on a Friday, in a less-popular part of the park, in case you get the impression that DuPont is an easy place to visit. As Yogi Berra famously said, “Nobody ever goes there — it’s too crowded.” This is true for all summer and most weekends at the parking lots with access to the most popular waterfalls. Corn Mill Shoals is more popular among the mountain biking crowd, and is hilly and waterfall-free, so it’s not the first choice for casual visitors.
As is the case in the DuPont trailheads, there’s a large kiosk with maps and information at one end of the parking lot. As is the case in NO OTHER DuPont trailhead, this kiosk is not located where one should actually hike. We found this out the hard way, as I recalled from my previous glance at the map that there’s a creek crossing almost immediately upon starting the hike. We headed down the worn path to the right of the kiosk to a creek with no obvious crossing point and high enough water that would require taking off our boots and rolling up our jeans. We thrashed around for a little while and Ruth found a crossing point upstream a few yards away, and we were finally on our way. Except that the trail on the other side of the creek immediately faded out. Finally in exasperation, I pulled up the Avenza map and discovered that we had stupidly started our hike on the west side of the parking lot when the actual trailhead is across the road! A more careful perusal of the map would have prevented this blunder. I was fuming by then. Maybe the area on the east side of Cascade Lake Road didn’t lend itself to a large parking area, but there was plenty of room to put a kiosk there. Who came up with the decision to put the kiosk literally as far away as possible, Beavis or Butt-Head?
After crossing the road to the obvious start of the Corn Mill Shoals trail, we were finally on our way, immediately crossing a creek routed under the trail in a culvert. So our first creek crossing was barely noticeable. Like several DuPont trails, Corn Mill Shoals is an old gravel road, an erstwhile service road back when the park was in its previous incarnation as a series of industrial facilities. After .1 mile of easy, level walking we reached the junction with the Big Rock trail, which headed off to the northeast and meandered uphill between the imaginatively-named Big Rock and a lobe of Cedar Rock. The slope wasn’t too bad, and we soon noticed an area of bare rock just off the trail to the right. We took a quick look then rejoined the trail, which at this point had shrugged off its soil cover and was just a corridor along the bare rock. At about .5 miles we reached a nice overlook with views to the northwest, and also met a pair of mountain bikers, the only folks we’d see for quite a while.
At .9 miles we reached the junction of the Big Rock and Cedar Rock trails, just past the summit of Cedar Rock. Here we opted to go left, to the east, so we would have a longer loop. Going right (south) at this point would knock about 1.5 miles off the route, if you’re looking for a shorter route. We liked being on top, with a crisp breeze blowing and the bare rock under our feet. The Cedar Rock trail slowly descended its namesake rock, mostly alternating between rocky open clearings and passing through little pine groves. At about 1.6 miles, the trail skirts a powerline cut, with the sound of Bridal Veil Falls below and to the east. The trail quickly ducks back into the trees to the west of the powerline, and ends at the Little River trail at 1.8 miles. The last .2 miles of the trail was a little boggy in places.
Now that we had descended Cedar Rock (never saw any cedar trees, by the way), the next part of the loop was a mostly-level jaunt along the Little River. This may sound delightful, but it’s really not all that scenic. The river is only visible in a couple of places, neither of which is particularly photogenic. With the recent rain the trail was wet in a number of places, with one feeder stream crossing requiring a little bit of navigation to skirt around. The Cedar Rock trail connects to the Little River trail in two places. We had joined from the eastmost junction, and the other end of the Cedar Rock trail joined up at about 2.4 miles. Between those two junctions the map showed a stream crossing, but it was an easy hop.
Wet weather stream crossingLittle RiverStream crossing between the two junctions of Cedar Rock and Little River trails
In the next .5 miles, the Little River trail continues to parallel the river until it curves away to tee into the Corn Mill Shoals trail. At about the halfway point, 2.65 miles into our hike, Tom Creek joins up with an unnamed creek that drains the south side of Big Rock, just west of the Little River trail. On the Avenza map, this is marked with a blue squiggly symbol, which at a glance I had associated with a waterfall. However, flooding on the right of the trail eventually made its way onto the trail itself, which disappeared under a few feet of water. Staring at the map, I at first concluded that the squiggly symbol represented shoals in Little River. Looking a bit to the south on the map, another such symbol spanned the Little River itself, where the Corn Mill Shoals trail crosses the river. Finally it dawned on me that the squiggles represented a major unbridged crossing. Now we had a choice to make — we could wade across Tom Creek to continue on the Little River trail, or turn around and take the western leg of Cedar Rock trail back up to the top and retrace our route down the Big Rock trail. Neither choice was palatable. The retreat would mean another uphill climb for about the same mileage. The creek crossing was relatively short, but also relatively deep, certainly mid-thigh, and we weren’t dressed for such an adventure.
Surprise creek crossing just south of the center of this image
After some debate, we decided that since we were only about a mile from the trailhead, on what would be relatively flat and easy walking, we would take the risk of getting our jeans wet and just ford the creek. Any thoughts of briefly doffing the trousers were quickly squashed by spotting our third human of the day on the other side of the creek. (Side note: here’s a free survival tip should you get lost in DuPont State Recreational Forest. Just drop your pants and I guarantee someone will show up within 30 seconds. I speak from experience. If Nature calls, answer her about 70 yards off-trail, under what cover you can find.)
I took off my boots and socks and tied them around my neck, then stepped into the creek. We had hiking poles for balance, but that first step put me in water up to my shins. About five yards into the crossing, I could hear Beavis cackling, “I am the Great Cornmillio! You’re going to get icy water all the way up to your ….” B&B fans know what word will follow here. For the rest of you, a brief anecdote. One of my daughters had a club soccer coach who was a bit of a character. When one player complained during practice that her knee was hurting, he asked, “Which one? Your low knee or your high knee?” In response to her confused look, he pointed to his knee and said, “low knee,” then pointed to his posterior and said, “high knee” (hiney, to any non-Southern readers out there). To this day, my family refers to the mid-leg joint as the “low knee.”
So at mid-creek, the water was up to my high knee, which meant it could be waist-high for Ruth. Fortunately, she learned from my mistake and took a route through slightly higher terrain so she got soaked just a little south of her high knee. It was about 40 degrees at the time, with little wind. Hiking in wet jeans is definitely not recommended, but the trail immediately widened and we made quick work of the .25 miles until the Little River trail met the Corn Mill Shoals trail. By the way, if you turn left (south) here, you’ll soon come to a major unbridged crossing of the Little River, one that appears on the Pisgah Map Co.’s paper map and the Avenza map, but not on the PDF map on the Friends of DuPont website. Only the Avenza map depicts the high water crossing of Tom Creek.
We turned right (north) here and made quick work (we were motivated!) of the .7 miles back to the parking lot. There was another crossing of Tom Creek on this stretch of the Corn Mill Shoals trail, but the creek ran under the trail via a culvert. It was a soggy ride home, but we weren’t out in the cold for very long. The GPS track says we covered around 3.8 miles.
So this hike was hastily planned and over-reliant on a single map, and we weren’t properly prepared for the conditions. It was poor form for experienced hikers, but we had enough experience to take a calculated risk with the creek crossing. Had it been a wider creek, or had there been more current or uncertain footing, or had it been a longer and/or more difficult route back to the parking lot, we would have (grumpily) climbed Cedar Rock again. On the plus side, we had an adventure that was far from mundane, and despite our stupidity we’ll back back for another episode. And we will almost certainly not be as asinine as a couple of cartoon characters I could mention. (“Heh heh heh. You said ‘ass.'”)
Oh, I nearly forgot — we’re on Instagram now! We plan to post some photos there weekly. If you do the ‘Gram, give us a follow @WoodlandsandWaters2023.
It was a quiet year for our little blog, chugging docilely into its seventh year. As retired persons, Ruth and I have continued pursuing efforts important to us, now that we have leisure time available in nearly unlimited quantity. Now that we do only what we want to, we’ve chosen to throw ourselves into community service activities. We’ve both put in massive hours volunteering for Friends of Silvermont, a local historic mansion and park, and their annual Pumpkin Fest fundraiser. Ruth has been very active in the local chapter of the American Association of University Women (AAUW), a group that I jokingly say runs the town (but they do). I’ve been participating in reader’s theatre at Silvermont (it serves as our local senior center), with a couple of public performances toward the end of the year, and taking a guitar class. Ruth has been one of the organizers of a group to bring together new and established Brevard residents for informal get-to-know-you events. The calendar is surprisingly full.
So as you might guess, we weren’t filling up all our time with hikes and outdoor adventures. But we did manage a few, and we even blogged about some of them. In 2022 we put up 10 posts, as compared to 25 posts in 2021, so our output was way down. A lack of new content to drive people to the site was reflected in our viewing stats, as expected. Even so, in a year in which we put forth minimal effort we still generated 23,133 page views from 12,907 visitors. Compared to last year’s 37,669 views, that’s about a 39% drop. We had 20,283 visitors in 2021, so that’s about a 36% drop in 2022. Considering that we put up less than half the amount of new content, that’s not all that bad. About 97.7% of our views came from the U.S., with views from nine different foreign countries.
We like to track which individual posts had the most views over the year, and once again two perennial favorites emerged to claim the #1 and #2 spots. The evergreen A Comparison of Three Southeastern Hike-in Lodges had 897 views in 2022, just nipping Marker Trees and Indian Tomb Hollow to the top spot with 895 views. These are old posts, so they’ve had plenty of time to get ensconced in search engine results. Our most popular of the 2022 posts was a tie between Local Color: Bracken Mountain Preserve and Next on the Docket: Devil’s Courthouse, each with 40 views. The Bracken Mountain post, from January 2022, documents a November 2021 hike. Our busiest month of 2022 was March, with 2,734 views.
There’s one unique thing about 2022, our first full year in North Carolina. Previously, we blogged on nearly every hike we took. In 2022, we didn’t get out on the trails quite as much, and we blogged about only a handful of our hikes. According to the blog posts, we hiked a total of around 46.73 miles. Ruth keeps a separate spreadsheet to track miles on all hikes, when we remember to record the mileage, and we actually covered around 85.25 miles in 2022. So, roughly speaking, we actually hiked about twice as much as our blog would suggest. Our shortest hike, going by the blog posts, was a 1.5 mile hike at Upper Whitewater Falls in the Nantahala National Forest. Our longest hike was a 7.2 helltrek on the Green River Cove Trail in the Green River Game Land in Polk County, NC. For the first time in the history of the blog, all hikes were done in one state, though we did have a couple of hikes in South Carolina that we didn’t blog about.
Of the hikes that we did blog about, we traveled in a city park, national forests, state forests, game lands, one unit of the NPS, and private preserves. We both had the same favorite hike in 2022 — our little jaunt to Upper Whitewater Falls, described in the post I Found My Thrill. We had done this hike previously, and reluctantly re-visited as part of White Squirrel Hiking Challenge 6. We caught the trail in a magnificent wildflower display, easily the best we’ve seen so far in North Carolina. Speaking of that hiking challenge, completing it was the hiking highlight of the year, with some particularly memorable trips. We’re looking forward to the 7th version of this challenge, and might even go back and finish some of the previous years’ iterations.
I’ve included a few favorite photos from hikes in 2022. Some were included in blog posts, and some are making their debut in this post. We might comb through the archives and write up a few of the 2022 hikes in 2023, or some of those photos and memories will remain unpublished. We do what we want to! But we’re glad that our content from the Tennessee Valley is still being looked at, and hope that over time we’ll build a similar following in North Carolina. Happy 2023 everyone, and get out there and have some outdoor adventures!
Eastatoe Trail, JanuaryHooker Falls, JanuaryLittle Bradley Falls, FebruaryJohn Rock, FebruaryBiltmore Estate, MarchOconee Bell, Devil’s Fork State Park, MarchPearson’s Falls, AprilSam Knob, AprilCatesby’s Trillium, Upper Whitewater Falls, AprilWintergreen Falls, MayGraveyard Fields, AugustFrolictown Falls, AugustGreen River Cove Trail, SeptemberYoungs Mountain, SeptemberReese Place Falls, OctoberHeadwaters State Forest, November
Woodlands and Waters 