Well, what do you know? We haven’t been kidnapped by Sasquatch, or fallen off a cliff, or swept away in a raging mountain river. It has been a minute, as the kids say, since we last posted. We may not be doing this retirement thing entirely correctly, as we have both gotten involved in volunteering with community groups that keep us regularly busy. Still, every now and then we shake free of our self-imposed obligations and venture into the woods. Which is why we moved to western North Carolina in the first place….
In the months since we last posted, we’ve put in a few hikes to waterfalls and other scenic destinations, and we’ve squirreled away some photos and memories which may eventually find their way onto these pages. Speaking of squirrels, we were excited to see that Conserving Carolina has announced White Squirrel Hiking Challenge 7. Every couple of years, Conserving Carolina posts a series of hikes to showcase properties they had a hand in preserving in Transylvania, Henderson, and Polk counties in North Carolina and a sliver of upstate South Carolina. We completed White Squirrel 6 and have been keeping an eye out for the next challenge. The confluence of a new hiking challenge and a new year was clearly an opportunity, so we decided to make our first day hike one from the White Squirrel 7 set.
White Squirrel 7 has eight hikes on it, with two of them nearby. To ease back into hiking after a holiday of the usual feasting and lassitude, we opted to hike close to home in DuPont State Forest. Our challenge hike for the day was the DuPont Loop: Twixt, Rock Quarry Road, and Wilkie trails, a 3.1 mile loop starting at the Corn Mill Shoals parking area off Cascade Lake Road. We moseyed over late in the morning and found the parking lot to be moderately busy, with the usual mix of bikers and hikers.
Our route, as laid out on the Conserving Carolina website, started by crossing Cascade Lake Road and starting on the Corn Mill Shoals trail, which is pretty much how most hikes in this area begin. At this point, Corn Mill Shoals is a wide former road, but almost immediately we turned left (north) onto the Longside trail, which is a narrower track that climbs gradually for 0.2 miles, paralleling Cascade Lake Road. At this point the trail splits, with Longside continuing to the right and Twixt trail also heading north to the left. Our route put us on the Twixt trail, which over its 0.4 mile entirety is an easy amble through the rhododendrons. Twixt emerges onto Cascade Lake Road, and about 50 yards away to the right, on the other side of Cascade Lake Road, Rock Quarry Road is easily visible.
Road Quarry Road is, well, a road leading to a rock quarry. It climbs modestly through a young pine and oak forest. We were expecting to find a typical quarry, a deep rocky hole with a lake at the bottom, but it turns out that this is a retired quarry that, like us, is turning back to nature. As we spotted some boulders tumbled to one side of the road, we took a detour at a clearing to look for the quarry, but quickly turned back when the side trail petered out. At about 0.7 miles from Cascade Lake Road, Rock Quarry Road takes a turn to the left, with a wide side trail to the right. This is nominally the quarry site, where in topo maps it looks like a chunk of the mountain was carved away. We took the side trail for about 0.1 miles as it cut between ridges. Though the quarry was used in DuPont as a gravel source, it appears that it only had surface excavations. It looks like rock was just dug out (or blasted) from the side of a ridge, as opposed to digging a deep hole. If this quarry wasn’t on Rock Quarry Road, I don’t think I would recognize it as a quarry. So it wasn’t quite what we were expecting — but it was even better.
After returning to Rock Quarry Road, we continued uphill to its junction with the Wilkie trail, which generally runs east-west from Cascade Lake Road to Rich Mountain Road. We were joining it a little bit east of its midpoint. Our route called for a sharp turn to the left (south), which was a nice wide footpath along a ridgetop. This is a pleasant stretch, with hints of views to either side. At roughly 0.6 miles from the Rock Quarry/Wilkie junction, Wilkie takes another sharp turn to the left and begins to descend.
The character of the trail changes at this point, as it becomes single track and the underlying rock begins to show through the fallen leaves and pine needles. As we wound back to the northeast, now below the ridgeline we had just traversed, views began to open up to the southeast. We noticed a handmade sign attached to a tree, bearing the legend “Broke Hip Mountain.” We didn’t know if this was a private joke or subtle hint about the footing, but just to be sure it was time to bust out the hiking poles.
Shortly after this, the trail entered an open area that turned into a great viewpoint to the south and east. Conserving Carolina describes it as a “granitic bald,” and it’s typical of the formations found on the east of Cascade Road, such as Big Rock and Cedar Rock. The soil has eroded to expose the underlying granite, with just a few patches of grass, sand myrtle (probably), reindeer moss, and stunted trees interspersed. Ruth was able to pick out other geologic features in the view, such as Burnt Mountain, using her PeakFinder app.
After a brief break, we resumed our downhill track, which was becoming a little steeper with a surface featuring more exposed stone and less leaf litter. We passed the southern end of the Micajah trail, and over the next 0.4 miles the Wilkie trail gradually descended to meet up with Cascade Lake Road, just about 0.1 mile to the south of the Corn Mill Shoals parking lot. Though the last part of the hike is along the road, the shoulder here is quite wide and you can walk quite safely back to the parking lot.
And with that, there was hike #1 for 2024 in the books, and also 1/8 of the White Squirrel Challenge 7 completed. The remaining hikes in the challenge vary in length and difficulty, but we are on our way. Even if you’re not interested in the hiking challenge, this kid-friendly loop is a good alternative hike in DuPont if you’ve already done the popular waterfall hikes and you’re looking for something different. Parts of the Wilkie trail could be a bit dicey when icy, but otherwise this hike was easy in most sections, well-marked, and well-engineered. Our GPS track shows that we covered 3.28 miles, including a couple of side trails.
As sporadic as our blog has become since we retired, it feels like an accomplishment to get something posted. This marks our ninth year of blogging! We’ve slowed down but we haven’t stopped — maybe that’s our theme for 2024.
Woodlands and Waters 