Jello leg. That’s what you call it when your legs are so tired the soft tissue has lost all strength and has simply become a gelatinous mass, and you rely on the structure of your bones, any assisting devices such as railings, and sheer willpower to ply your way up the remains of whatever incline has reduced you to such extreme exhaustion. It’s not something that occurs from a day of hiking, it occurs from a relatively short but sustained, steep climb, the likes of which are found on rustic trails or, more likely, stairways that stretch as far as the eye could see. I had jello leg that day in north Georgia. I was on antibiotics strong enough to tranquilize a horse. For good measure, I was also on a generous dose of nsaids, for I was only beginning to discover their important in reducing harmful inflammation before it starts (something pretty useful for people hiking with hip problems). I was tired, but I was happy. For I had just descended the near 1,000 feet from the top of Tallulah Gorge to the bottom, successfully ascending the other side, hip injury be damned.
Tallulah Gorge had fascinated me when I first glimpsed it on a road trip with a high school buddy’s family to North Carolina. Without such features in Florida, I thought anything with the name “gorge” sounded pretty cool, and what view I could catch from the road called for me to one day see more, even though I didn’t know at the time I would grow into the nature enthusiast and photographer I would be as an adult. When I started researched what that place was like in real life, and not just my idyllic view, I got even more intrigued, as it was highly recommended by everyone I knew who had visited.
North Georgia is a nice place. For us Central Floridians, as the first real mountains we come across, it’s the nearest faraway place. There are plenty of nice waterfalls, creeks, and vistas to amuse oneself with. But I mean this as no disrespect to this fine area or fans of it; many north Georgia locations, aside from those special ones that true backcountry folk can get to, have a more dramatic version in nearby states. And again, that’s no insult, for within a few hours drive one has the mystical peaks of the Smokies, the mindblowing and rustic Linville Gorge, the ominous Black Mountains, the ruggedness of Grandfather Mountain, or the pastoral balds of the NC-TN line. These are some of the finest places in southern Appalachia, and it’s no shame that the lowest stretch of the Blue Ridge Mountains doesn’t have quite the same caliber locations all over. But Tallulah Gorge, at least when one takes into account the tremendous sights to be had from the excellent trail system leading down to the gorge floor, where national park-worthy scenes can be found, is one place in Georgia that rises up to that standard of one of Appalachia’s best.
There was no way I was going to miss Tallulah Gorge. Though I researched a wealth of north Georgia locations to serve as potential bonus stops, there was never any doubt that Tallulah Gorge would be the first stop on our itinerary for our next visit to the Smokies. And when our plans to visit the Smokies that summer got canceled and we re-imagined our trip as a Blue Ridge Parkway centered fall excursion, it was still always the first stop, for it lied alongside the road (US-23) that was the primary route to both the Smokies and pretty much all of western North Carolina. We had to visit Tallulah Gorge, but make no mistake about it; I was terrified. This was no soft opening to our trip. It was a brutal ascent to go down to the gorge floor and back up, and anyway you want involved either a number of stairs or an otherwise very steep ascent. This would be challenging under any conditions for someone coming from Florida, but I wasn’t just anybody. I was a person who had been almost sedentary for months, as for much of them doing pretty much anything but lying down caused pain in my injured hip (before I hurt my hip, we were doing stair training at least twice a week in preparation, but when I tried to resume training in the weeks before our trip, my hip reacted negatively). I had visions of Cloudland Canyon, where a similar staircase-heavy hike had left me nearly passed out on a log, though that was under challenging circumstances in immense summer heat. And my god, how was my hip going to hold up when presented with a genuinely strenuous hike, and not just the walk in the woods that was High Falls the day before?
Ideally I wouldn’t have had to place such a strenuous undertaking at the beginning of the itinerary, but you can’t change the physical location of places to suit your needs. Either we did Tallulah Gorge first, or we didn’t do it at all. And while I wasn’t taking longer, more strenous hikes than necessary on this trip (I was fortunate to find a huge slate of North Carolina’s best trails which fell into a certain difficulty spectrum), I was going to see what I wanted to see. I was going to push until my hip told me not to, because I needed to know whether I could hike in the mountains without having my labrum surgically repaired. And I wanted to see Tallulah Gorge. So I willingly but nervously embarked upon this endeavor, knowing full well there was a high potential that my hip could “go nuclear”, filling my world with pain, causing the side of my hip to inflame and for my groin muscles to lose the ability to lift my leg, rendering further hiking on our planned eight day trip impossible. Considering that, saying I was nervous is an understatement, as so much of my future (not just this trip) rode on whether or not my hip would pass the test.
It was a foggy and cloudy morning (with a hint of rain) as we drove the hour from hotel north of Atlanta to the state park entrance. I couldn’t have asked for more perfect weather for this type of hike if I tried. There was one potential major disappointment that greeted us at the park. Everyone I know had implored us to get a gorge floor permit, for it was necessary to leave the boardwalk to hike along (and across) the river, something required to reach some special locations within the gorge. Getting the gorge floor permit, of which only a certain number are allowed each day, was part of the reason why we were arriving early. So when we found out upon entering the park that they wouldn’t be offering the gorge permit that day we were….
Relieved! So freaking relieved. Could you imagine, me crossing the cold river, tripod and camera in hand with no camera gear, hip untested, and having to make a steep scramble back up the gorge after all was said and done? I was actually going to do it, or at least fabricate some type of explanation for my friends about why I couldn’t do it, but the option to potentially make that bad choice was completely removed. Now I wouldn’t have to embark on an adventure that was above my ability at the time or else feel the guilt for not having gotten the full Tallulah Gorge experience. Now I could just enjoy the gorge from the still physically challenging boardwalk, and without the potential thrill of falling in the river with camera equipment, I would have to survive on the excitement of potentially wrecking my hip again and needing surgery.
We set out on the trail along the north rim of the gorge, with me carrying a bit lighter load than usual as I had opted for taking my small mirrorless Nikon V1 and its miniature camera bag, both weighing a fraction of what my DSLR and associated camera bag weighed. While the V1 lacked some resolution compared to my DSLR, I had grown very comfortable with using it in lieu of the larger camera at times, as its negligible size and weight on a tripod, plus a very functional rear screen that allowed for easy focusing, allowed me to compose shots in a fraction of the time as the larger, bulkier camera. Sometimes the ease of framing allowed me to get compositions that would have been tougher to dial in with the bigger camera. At other times it allowed for extremely quick tripod setup in an area laden with people, which was a repeated occurrence on this trip where we were hitting some of the most popular spots in southern Appalachia to see fall color at near-peak time.
We soon caught our first glimpse of the gorge, with fog providing an air of the ethereal as it drifted past the rocky outcroppings and thick woods along the sides of the gorge. It was at this point that I realized I had forgotten my tripod mount, so I had to backtrack through the woods back to the parking area to retrieve it from the car. Upon my return trip, I made a point to take a few pictures of the beautiful forest. Though the woods hadn’t yet really adopted shades of deep fall color, even the hints of yellow and gold scattered about the trees was enough to bring excitement to this Florida couple who had never experienced fall before. While we had intentionally chosen a trip during autumn, naturally hoping to see the color during our trip, I had mostly planned our trip just seeking out well rounded hiking and scenic experiences, not necessarily obsessing over catching peak color in the prime location, though we would certainly run into that in at least one instance. I found it much less satisfying when I tried to seek out fall color in particular two years later.
Breaking out of the woods lead to overlook three, which provided a sweeping view of the gorge as well as the river far below. I did my best to point my camera downward into the gorge, hoping to get a shot containing both waterfalls within view at that point. Even with the more agile V1, this was a bridge too far, though I’m glad I attempted to capture it as it was nice to have the shot to put things in perspective later on.
I took way too many photos of top down views, far more than the difficult viewing angles were worth. One must remember, I had taken several mountain trips without giving myself a chance to tripod up a waterfall. Now I was a beast unleashed. A reckless, inexperienced beast, who showed no restraint. Fortunately I took less time taking the shots than might be imagined since the little camera was so easy to frame and shoot with.
But it wasn’t the top down views of the gorge we were most interested in. No, the whole point of visiting Tallulah Gorge is to be in Tallulah Gorge. And for that we had to go down. WAY down. Enter the stairs. An endless, inescapable onslaught of stairs. They greet you from the gorge rim and beckon you to follow them as they disappear in a flurry of leaves. One feels a great deal of excitement when entering these stairs, as you know there are visual treats lying out of view just waiting to be enjoyed. One also feels a little bit of nerves (especially those with hip problems), for what goes down Tallulah Gorge must come back up. Onward we went, and this was the moment, plunging downward towards the first real signature highlight of our trip, that it felt like I was finally realizing that dream of experiencing something I had yearned for over the last two years.
It’s at the bottom of that long stairway that lies maybe Tallulah Gorge’s single most distinct feature; the suspension bridge spanning the river well below, despite the fact that you’ve dropped hundreds of feet in elevation in a short time to get there. The look of the aqua river flowing below like a scene out of the Pacific Northwest was a view worth savoring. So excited I was to get the view from the bridge that I really didn’t get a good shot of the bridge structure itself, a bit of a bummer.
Taking all those steps down to the suspension bridge doesn’t mean your journey has ended. Soon, an even more impressive sight awaits, as you follow the boardwalk to a viewing platform with an absolutely astounding view. To one side is Hurricane Falls and a gorgeous plunge pool, while looking the other way displays a picturesque, dramatic river bend, with immense rocks and shimmering water. Here I was finally able to get a satisfactory waterfall shot with Hurricane Falls as my subject. I wanted to take a view showing the platform in the foreground, but the amount of people out enjoying this day meant my best course of action was just to tripod at the end of the platform and get what I could. I seem to remember old people waiting impatiently for me to finish, but they could wait. I had come a long way and been through a lot for these opportunities. Their two minutes played to my two years.
It seems like there was so much more to the bottom of the gorge than the select few spots I’ve gone through (and if you get the gorge floor permit, there is), but those select few spots fill a big space. Now, though, the real challenge came. The stairs. Oh so many stairs. An absolutely incomprehensible amount of stairs for those who have not been. The only similar place in the area would be Cloudland Canyon, but even that tends to break up the stairs into several different sections. Going up the stairs on the south side of Tallulah Gorge is practically one sustained, brutal push. One that I wasn’t sure my hip, which would be asked to do more than it had in 5 months, could do. Time to find out. Up we went.
On and on the stairs went, but I kept pushing. My legs began to get that jello feeling, but my heart was best continuing on in one push. On my legs went, as the words Cloudland Canyon began to run through my head, with flashbacks of being bent over that log, ready to pass out, as my motivation to just keep moving at all costs. The top was within sight (this site keeps the stairs in much more plain view), and despite the fact that my legs seemed to lose all structure, I kept moving. The railing assisted me when I needed it. Pushing, and pushing, I was almost within arms reach of the top, and if I needed to, I was going to pull myself over the threshold. There was no need though. I emerged over the edge of the last stair, and after eyeing my surroundings suspiciously, I confirmed that there were definitely no more stairs in the immediate area. I scurried off to find the nearest bench to finally give my body some rest. Medicated and unsure of my hip as I was, I had just climbed more stairs than I had in the last five months combined. Jess, whose cardiovascular system responds better to a different pace than myself, arrived safely a minute later. We rested for a minute, but thankfully we soon regained the energy to move forward. While circumstances dictated I wasn’t able to prepare by getting my body in shape before the trip, we had at least learned from mistakes on our previous trips and made sure our bodies were as well nourished as possible.
The north rim, at least the part that we had hiked before reaching the stairs, had rationed out just a few select tantalizing views through the trees to the gorge below. The south rim, however, was a completely different story. Everything was extremely open, and views into the gorge were essentially unimpeded as you walked with the giant ravine on your left. The closed nature of the gorge on the north side were part of what made looking in from the south side so special, as the rock features jutting out from the opposite side of the heavily wooded gorge were truly exceptional.
The path along the south rim undulated as it gripped the edge of the gorge. The occasional rises were an afterthought compared to what had been done before. It does reach a terminus not too far from where the stairs from the suspension bridge comes in. Here was where the most fascinating, sweeping view of the gorge could be had. The remainder of our hike lie behind us, and we began to retrace our steps back towards the stairway, which we would pass and continue on to the complete a loop hike, crossing the river on the dam lying at the top of the gorge.
While doubling back on our tracks I came upon what was to be my favorite view and photograph at Tallulah Gorge. Down below was Hurricane Falls, which we had seen up close at the bottom of the gorge. While that view was certainly impressive, the profile of it from high above was even more jaw-dropping. My fortunate choice of small camera paid big dividends, as there was just a select space between the railings in the gorge. Much too small for a normal camera lens to fit through unimpeded, the opening was just enough to allow the tiny lens opening of my V1 through. I doubt many people doing serious photography have something so small, so the angle I got is probably not always replicated like a lot of waterfalls, where many good photographers take similar frames. I was in heaven, getting to photograph such striking scenes that would have wide appeal.
Continuing on to the dam, where the trail would cross the river in conjunction with US441, there was an occasional overlook that provided a view into the gorge. Every welcome view of the gorge provided another stunning spectacle. Crossing the river provided another excellent view. Immediately past the damn, the river is far below. It was very interesting standing at the top of the gorge, peering between the forested two walls that contained the cascading river below.
I attempted a shot facing sharply down towards the river as you crossed it. The frame I could get wasn’t exceptionally pleasing from a photographic perspective, but it is great just as a way to document the sight of the dramatic riverbed below.
After crossing the river we were now on the northern side of the gorge again, with the views mostly obstructed as you walked through a thick forest. And while it must seem unfair to the rest of the locations in Georgia, what with the wealth of spectacles Tallulah Gorge has already presented, but the stretch of woods along the north rim is really the prettiest forest I’ve seen in Georgia. It was just perfect, and was a great supplement to the wonders we had already seen.
I’m a sucker for nice woods. While the wonders like waterfalls always stand out, I get as much satisfaction at taking an exceptional woods shot. They weren’t that hard to find here. The soft light, with the sun providing some illumination for the woods but mostly being behind the clouds, was a Godsend. The shades of green, gold, and glimpses of red stood out so well.
The walk was so pleasant that it seemed like no time had passed before we had crossed the point where we started, as the trail from the visitor’s center and parking area reached towards the stairway into the gorge we had taken early. We weren’t done yet though.
There was another nice view to be had in front of visitor’s center, this time showing a reverse view to the trademark suspension bridge far below.
We ventured onward, and the good forest views continued. Sadly, my camera battery did not. I cannot recall if I either forgot my spare camera battery or if the one I brought decided to pick that inopportune moment to decided it could no longer power through. At any rate, we were farther from the parking area than would be practical to return once I discovered the problem. I probably would have been much more careful to conserve power by not recklessly snapping power-devouring long exposures had I known I would only have one good battery, but that’s life. Every photographer knows, however, that you can always milk a few more shots out of a drained battery simply by turning the camera off and then back on. And so it would be, with every shot following being taken living on borrowed time.
Our final destination at Tallulah Gorge was known as Inspiration Point, which is the highest overlook to be found along the gorge. We had some debate about whether to venture on towards it, as the trek towards it contained an uphill climb of several hundred feet. That’s a fairly negligible amount when discussing mountain hiking, but for people who hadn’t been able to adequately train for getting out of flat Florida, and who had already walked several miles including the stairways in and out of the gorge which drained as like I drained my camera battery, it didn’t seem that negligible, and we certainly felt like we had gotten a pretty complete picture of the gorge. Still, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see what may be the best view in the gorge, so we toughed it out and slogged the circular path which led to a wide viewing area. On this day, as it was approaching the later hours of the morning, this area was crawling with people, but that didn’t detract from the great scenery. I milked a couple more shots out of my camera, and the view certainly delivered. To our left, we could look downstream as the opposing ridgelines alternated reaching towards the river. On the right, we looked upstream to where we had came, getting an encompassing view of the park and for the first time getting a sweeping view of the surrounding area, including a few standalone peaks nearby.
After enjoying the view from Inspiration Point we ended our hike at Tallulah Gorge. We weren’t entirely done with the gorge, however. We decided to check out another “brown sign” (the type that usually leads to attractions) nearby and head down a side road of 441 south of the gorge. We didn’t find what we were expecting, but we did find a neat country store and restaurant clinging to the south rim of the gorge not far outside the park. We ordered sandwiches and headed upstairs to the open air dining area, where we got to enjoy our basic meals with another sweeping view of the gorge. The meal was basic, not much to write home about (or write a blog post about?), but the experience of savoring a meal on the edge of the gorge was an enjoyable experience. Sadly (or perhaps not, depending on how much you like my photos) I left the camera in the car, and thus I didn’t capture this view for posterity.
After downing our sandwiches we were able to digest both our food and the great experience we had just had. Places that you have high expectations of don’t always deliver, but Tallulah Gorge met or exceeded everything I hoped for. Descending the stairs through the thick forest towards the gorge floor below was like descending into another world, one exceeding even the otherwise nice area around it. Hiking the gorge rim lead to some terrific views, and even the forest at times just seemed special. As amazing as it was and the high praise I’ve offered, it might be amazing to know that I don’t even place it among the top three locations on our trip, almost all of which was yet to come. And that’s not a knock on Tallulah Gorge at all, but instead a testament to the amazing things still ahead. The most amazing thing about Tallulah Gorge was that I was able to descend and ascend its steep walls without any adverse affects to my hip, when scarcely more than a month before I had been at the doctor discussing surgery, wondering if I could ever hike strenuously again. It was my miracle.
We still hadn’t finished our stops for the day, and looked forward to at least one more location in Georgia before heading on to explore North Carolina.
J. Parker Nature Stories 