Our first hike of 2023 was enjoyable but a bit tame, so we were looking for a little more adventure on our next outing. Our rainy winters are terrific waterfall fuel, so we took off to Panthertown on a Friday morning to check out three waterfalls along the Devil’s Elbow trail.
This was our fourth trip to Panthertown, which is a 6,300-acre backcountry area of the Nantahala National Forest north of Sapphire, North Carolina. We’ve hiked many, but not all, of the trails there and have seen several of the waterfalls. There are 30 miles of officially-recognized hiking trails in the Panthertown Valley, with a subset of those trails open for equestrians and mountain biking.
Panthertown is the source of the Tuckasegee River, which forms at the confluence of Panthertown and Greenland Creeks and flows generally northwest, passing through Cullowhee, Dillsboro, Silva, and Bryson City, NC, before flowing into Fontana Lake in Tennessee, ultimately ending at the Little Tennessee River. I hadn’t really thought about it, but we’ve had many vacations where the Tuckasegee was in the background, where we’ve crossed it dozens of times on bridges. In researching this post, I discovered the happy speculation that its name may be a derivation of the Cherokee word daksiyi, meaning “turtle place!” Given Ruth’s love of turtles, it has to be kismet that we would find ourselves hiking along its first couple of miles.
So we were off on a cool but clear Friday morning in early January, arriving without incident at the Cold Mountain Gap trailhead on the east end of Panthertown. We were pleasantly surprised to find ourselves the first to arrive, which boded well for having some solitude on the trail. Another group pulled up just as we started down the Panthertown Valley trail, just to the right of the kiosk.
The first segment of the hike was familiar territory, as this end of the Panthertown Valley Trail descended briefly through the woods for 0.15 miles before crossing a little stream on a bridge, then intersecting with the gravel road that constitutes most of the Panthertown Valley Trail. We turned left on the road, passed through a powerline cut, passed a second kiosk and an open gate, and at about 0.45 miles arrived at a sharp bend in the trail. In our past hikes, we’ve stuck to the official trail (the road), but thought we’d try something different and instead took a user-created trail as a shortcut down Boardcamp Ridge to the bottom of the valley. The trail was well-established and not particularly steep, and we soon found ourselves back on the Panthertown Valley Trail, where we turned right (north) to continue to the junction with the Devil’s Elbow Trail in 0.15 miles.
The Devil’s Elbow Trail is another old logging road that heads north, then northeast, to the geological feature of the same name, which is a sharp bend in the Tuckasegee River. There is nothing particularly demonic about the trail itself — it’s nice and wide with gentle grades, gradually climbing along the north side of Boardcamp Ridge and passing under the powerline cut again. Not long after passing under the powerlines, about 0.09 miles to be exact, we reached the side trail to our first waterfall of the day, Warden’s Falls.
The trail down to Warden’s Falls is not an official Forest Service trail, so there is no signpost. However, someone has kindly marked the route with orange flagging tape, and the footbed is obvious. On the day of hike, you could plainly hear the waterfall, engorged after several days of rain. The route to the top of the waterfall is only a smidge over 0.1 miles, and we were pleased to find a little bonus on our way — a geocache in plain sight at a bend in the trail! Of course we had to stop and add our handles to the logbook before continuing down to the waterfall. Moments later, we reached the top of the falls, where we had an obscured look at a torrent pouring over a drop in the riverbed. We then headed downstream to find a suitable place to descend to the bottom of the fall. The path quickly ended, still well above the river, with a piece of webbing tied to a tree and flung down a steeply sloping bank.
So I ask you, here you are on your first visit to a trail, and there’s a strap dropping down a slick rock face to a landing point not quite visible from the top, where a tumble into the river would lead to certain injury and quite possibly death. On the other hand, that’s the only way to get a good photo of a waterfall. What do you do?
Of course, you pull hard on the strap to test it, wrap it around one arm, and you lean backward and slowly walk down the rock face to a narrow ledge. Then, because the waterfall is not entirely in view, you crawl along the ledge, over and under rhododendron branches, to get another angle.
It was slow going. The high water made this more challenging than is probably typical, as you could probably wade into the river to get photos when there’s not as much flow. This wasn’t an option for this hike, as I preferred to see the next two waterfalls from the bank, instead of as a participant. Ruth had stayed up at the anchor point of the strap, no doubt composing my obituary as she waited to see if I would make it back.
Seven weeks later, as I write this from my hospital bed … just kidding, I made it back just fine. The rock face, though wet, actually had pretty decent traction and the strap held firm. I wouldn’t suggest this side trip unless you have footwear with decent grip and some upper body strength. We retraced our route back to Devil’s Elbow Trail and turned left (northeast) to continue our route. Unlike some previous hikes, I had spent some time on researching this route and knew that we’d have to cross Little Green Creek without a bridge. With the water expected to be relatively high, we acceded to the inevitable and packed water shoes for this hike. About 0.4 miles after rejoining Devil’s Elbow, we reached Little Green Creek, which was just wide enough and just deep enough to make it worth our while to change to the water shoes for a quick splash across the creek. Again, on many days you could probably make the crossing without getting your feet wet, but not after heavy rains. On a cold day, with miles yet to hike, prudence wins over inconvenience.
About 0.1 miles after the creek crossing, we came to a trail split, with Devil’s Elbow continuing uphill and to the right, and Riding Ford Trail heading downhill to the left. For this hike, we wanted to visit the two falls on Riding Ford, so we headed left on a similarly wide, well-graded trail. I had read that along this stretch of the Riding Ford Trail that there would be a side trail down to a campsite on the Tuckasegee, with Jawbone Falls just a short distance away. We hiked about .1 mile from the trail junction to where Riding Ford Trail crosses the Tuckasegee without seeing an obvious side trail. The junction of Riding Ford and the Tuckasegee is the top of Riding Ford Falls, which like most waterfalls is not that impressive when viewed at the top. We did a little bushwhacking along the riverbank here, and ultimately headed upstream on a well-worn user-created trail to quickly arrive at a clearing where the discolored ground made it obvious we had arrived at the campsite. Again, orange ribbons led from the campsite back toward the river, though it was hardly necessary as the roar of Jawbone Falls made it easy to find.
Jawbone Falls is in a lovely location, with a huge relatively shallow pool at the base which would be an excellent swimming hole on a hot day. It was a cold day, and the sun was awkwardly placed to get a good photo, so if you’re looking for better light it’s probably best to arrive in the afternoon. We sat on a log and ate our lunch, enjoying the roar of the water and the weak winter sun.
We had already glimpsed our last waterfall of the trio, Riding Ford Falls, so it was easy to backtrack to the campsite and back to Riding Ford Trail. The trail actually continues on the west side of the river, eventually ending at the Powerline Road Trail, but that’s a hike for another day. Given that this trail looks like an old road, “the” Riding Ford was probably a shallow crossing of the Tuckasegee easily managed on foot, horseback, or in a vehicle. Though the river is shallow at this point, there was quite a bit of water moving in it so we stuck to the east bank and bushwhacked downstream to a better vantage point for Riding Ford Falls. There wasn’t a convenient user-created trail here — lots of over and under and around, with scaling some boulders involved to get a decent photo.
From here, it was just a routine walk back to the parking lot on Riding Ford, Devil’s Elbow, and Panthertown Valley trails, though we did give our knees a break by taking the longer route up Boardcamp Ridge by sticking to the official trail instead of steeper user-created trail. Overall, our GPS track says we covered 4.4 miles, and we can check off the first three waterfalls on the Tuckasegee.
I think it’s best to give former North Carolina poet laureate Kathryn Stripling Byer the last word. As she wrote in her melancholy poem “Tuckasegee:”
Until / it runs out like the river, / our time is the music / the water makes, leaving / who’s left of us listening.
From Black Shawl, by Kathryn Stripling Byer
Woodlands and Waters 