WNC waterfalls, 12 Apr 2015

[chiefWright]

Oh, how we love our Oregon waterfalls, and justifiably proud are we of them.

However, I may be spending a good bit of my time on business travel to the Carolinas over the next year and probably won't have a lot of spare time to get my Columbia Gorge waterfall fix. This last week is one such trip that needed to overlap last weekend. Hearing that the Blue Ridge Province in Western North Carolina was a hot spot for waterfalls, I headed out that way over the weekend to inspect. I was not disappointed!

Whitewater Falls, Nantahala NF

The Appalachia are old. Really, really old. They were already ground down pretty good when most of Oregon was still offshore waiting to get welded onto the North American plate. The Blue Ridge is the eroded "rift-flank uplift" remnant that occured when the NA and Eurasian/African plates parted ways at the mid-atlantic ridge about 250 mya. Of course this happend long, long after the ancestral Appalacians themselves had been uplifted starting about 450 mya. Anyway, the sea level shot up about 100 mya and started whittling away at the uplift, leaving behind a rocky coastline. That boundary erosion, togther with a pretty major fault left behind the Blue Ridge Escarpment, a nice elevation feature that's quite amenable to waterfalls and the like.

That escarpment was formed out of the hard-as-nails roots of the ancestral Appalacians-- metamorphic gneiss and such.

Here's the kicker. These are waterfalls that could have existed (in one form or another) long before there was even a Columbia Gorge to have waterfalls! Humbling, no?

Hooker Falls, DuPont SP

Triple falls, DuPont SP

Lookingglass falls, Pisgah NF

Second falls, Yellowstone Prong, Blue Ridge Parkway NP

Rainbow falls, Gorges SP

So may I quote the words of a hymn to Sebelius' Finlandia:

My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,
and sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine;
but other lands have sunlight too, and clover,
and skies are everywhere as blue as mine:
O hear my song, thou God of all the nations,
a song of peace for their land and for mine.

Great God, I love this land!

[rainrunner]

Nice report and pictures.
I love the mountains in that part of the country, it kind of reminds me of the cascades minus the volcanoes.
It has so much beauty and history that you could spend an entire vacation just exploring one small section.

[BrianEdwards]

Hey that's awesome! Thanx for sharin

[olderthanIusedtobe]

Cool, nice waterfalls. My brother lived in northern Virginia for a while. When I visited him we did a couple hikes in Shenandoah National Park. Falls galore there, too. Did a nice loop up one creek and down another.