I didn’t want to let too much time go by before I talked about my trip to Linville Gorge. I finally just finished going through photos from the hike and producing a short video about it on YouTube. I only spent two full days in the gorge, but I would be remiss not to write a little bit about this hike as it ended up being so much more than what I expected. I highly recommend visiting Linville Gorge if you get the chance, and I definitely want to go back!
To rewind, in October of this past year, I went to hike the Foothills Trail, which is largely in South Carolina. I finished that hike in Table Rock State Park, SC, hopped in the wagon (my Subaru Outback) and drove several hours north to Linville Gorge.
The gorge is about 30 miles southwest of Boone, NC in Pisgah National Forest. I can’t pinpoint the first time I heard about it as a hiking destination. It never made my written list of “trails to hike,” but somehow stuck in my head as a place that I wanted to check out. Then, last year I joined a Meetup group for hikers in Atlanta. My wife and I moved to North Carolina before I ever had a chance to go hike with any of those people, but I saw that they had done a trip to Linville Gorge previously. The trip organizer had uploaded some maps of their route, which was the first time I had even seen a map of the gorge. Along with the chopped-up snapshots of the trails they cobbled together, they commented that the hike was tougher than expected, but rewardingly so and beautiful. That was enough to spark my interest. Looking at the map, I could see that they had traversed a roughly 40-mile loop around the gorge, and so I decided I would do the same, when and if I got the chance. I knew that there were many trails there, but I liked the idea of a route that would give me as much exposure to both the rim and floor of the gorge as possible.
Knowing that we were moving from Atlanta to the North Carolina coast at the end of November, and given that fall is a wonderful time to be in the mountains, I resolved to combine the Foothills Trail and gorge trips. Linville Gorge is a long drive from Atlanta, so combining the two would efficiently save me a little gas money and transport time as well. I would wait until our house went under contract and then squeeze the adventure in between contract and closing.
Prior to the trip, I didn’t really do much research or even look at many pictures of Linville Gorge. I downloaded a free map that I could use in my Avenza app and located permit and camping information on the US Forest Service website. I took the time to plot out my route in Avenza. You can draw lines to mark routes and layer them over the map so that you can follow them, which is what I did. There is a large network of trails in the gorge, so this helped me to stick to my desired route. And that was about it. I really didn’t prepare more than that. The Avenza map had water sources marked on it. I figured water would be scarce on the gorge rim, because that is just normally how it works – high points are usually drier. I was going to be fresh off the Foothills Trail, so I would just use the same gear. I prepared two days of food and left it in my car while hiking the Foothills Trail. That way I didn’t have to worry about stopping to resupply in between hikes.
I wouldn’t say I was underprepared for the hike. Digital maps and the internet are amazing tools. However, I definitely underestimated the level of difficulty of the terrain. I knew the Meetup group had commented that it was a tough hike, but I figured coming off of the Foothills Trail I would just be a machine, able to conquer mountains and gorges in leaps and bounds. I fell victim to that age old feeling of invincibility, that the number of miles under my belt somehow exempted me from the reality of terrain, and, well, having physical limits.
When I finished up the Foothills Trail, I was feeling great. I had beautiful fall weather: bluebird skies, warm days, and crisp nights. I drove up to Wolf Pit trailhead on the eastern side of the gorge. I would start my loop there, almost immediately joining the Mountains-to-Sea Trail as I climbed up Shortoff Mountain. From there the loop would take me north up the eastern rim, across official solid line trails, and less-official dotted line “social” trails on the Avenza map, all the way up to the Linville Falls Visitor Center. I would cross over the Visitor Center bridge to the western side of the Linville River and complete my loop by hiking back south through the gorge along the river, until fording it at the southern end to get back to Wolf Pit trailhead. I stuck to this plan, with several small detours.
I didn’t get to Wolf Pit trailhead until about 1:30 in the afternoon. I stopped near Hendersonville, NC on my way north for lunch. There is a Dunkin’ Donuts right off Interstate 26 that I had stopped at a few times in the past when kayaking in the Green River Game Lands. It was the perfect place to refuel in preparation for the gorge. To be clear, by “refuel” I mean eating a greasy breakfast sandwich and multiple donuts.
Because I did this trip during the week, I didn’t have any trouble finding a parking spot at Wolf Pit. I also didn’t have to worry about a permit, which I will discuss in more detail at the end of this post. I threw on my pack and started the climb up Shortoff Mountain.
The scenery was immediately beautiful at Linville Gorge. Before even reaching the upper rim near Shortoff Mountain, I was already getting wonderful views of the surrounding mountains, valleys, and Lake James in the distance. The fall reds and oranges were not quite at their peak, but added plenty of splashes of color along the way. I saw a trail marker for the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, which runs all the way from Clingman’s Dome in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park to the Outer Banks on North Carolina’s Coast. If you hike some of the more popular trails in North Carolina, like the Appalachian Trail, Art Loeb Trail, etc., you’re bound to run into the MST. Ironically, I now live close to a portion of the MST as it follows roads towards Surf City in the southern portion of the Outer Banks.
Hiking up the south side of the east rim was relatively easy. I spent a lot of time at various viewpoints taking in the incredible scenery. The day was sunny and surprisingly hot on the rim. There wasn’t a lot of water, but there was enough scattered sporadically along the way. As I’ve already alluded to, despite visiting a lot of overlooks, I kept up a pretty quick pace.
As I worked farther north along the rim, the rock formations became more dramatic and interesting, and the hiking increased in difficulty. There was a group of formations dubbed The Chimneys, and of course, there was a Table Rock. Table Rock is one of the most common rock formation names I have come across over my years of exploration. These features are all visible on the Avenza map, and often people drive to other access points so that they can hike in and out to view them in a single afternoon.
It would be easy to spend a couple of days in this part of the gorge alone, just climbing around on the various formations, and enjoying sunrise and sunset views. My original plan was to camp up on the rim on night one for this precise reason. For better or worse, I pushed too far, realizing after descending past Little Table Rock that my route was not going to take me back up to the rim. I was tired and it was getting late in the day, so I did not try to climb back up. I instead kept going and found a campsite deeper in the woods. It was a lovely spot, but there would be no sunset or sunrise views. If you decide to take the same route and want to camp up on the gorge rim, just know that Little Table Rock is your last chance to do so until Hawksbill summit.
That night I had a nice campfire, hung my food, and went to bed. The next morning I rose early to give myself plenty of time to hike a full day. I passed by Spence Ridge, where many hikers descend to cross over the gorge, and continued north toward Hawksbill peak. I had originally planned to take a dotted line trail along the ledge up the east side of Hawksbill, but I had heard that it was quite overgrown and hard to follow, involving some bushwhacking. I was starting to feel a slight ache in my right shin, so I decided to avoid the ledge trail and instead walked a dirt road for about a mile up to the approach trail to Hawksbill summit. It was a simple adjustment and worked out just fine.
The views from Hawksbill peak were spectacular. The descent down from Hawksbill was less so…. It was rocky and steep and spat me down onto another ridge, from where I eventually made the painfully steep climb up Sitting Bear Rock. I huffed and sweated my way up Sitting Bear, but, like most tough climbs, the views at the top were grand.
My right shin was starting to become more uncomfortable at this point, from my shin down to the top of my right angle. I hadn’t done anything noticeable to cause the injury, such as a fall or stumble, but there was a familiarity to the pain that planted a seed of dread in the back of my mind. I had felt this kind of pain before. As an avid runner, I have experienced shin splints on a number of occasions. The worst case I had up to this point was when I was 30. It knocked me out of running for months. This pain was starting to feel like that. Nevertheless, I didn’t want to believe it, and, at that moment, it was still faint enough for me to will it away in the back of my mind.
From Sitting Bear I went further down Jonas Ridge and then turned west onto Brushy Ridge. At some point, I would love to return and explore the area around Devil’s point southwest of Brushy Ridge and closer to the edge of the gorge rim. From the topography on the map, I have a feeling the scenery there would be incredible. As it was, I continued from Brushy Ridge to the Joe Johnson connector trail until it briefly exited the woods at a bend in Joe Johnson Road off of highway 181. I walked through a large meadow. The view east across the road was surprisingly beautiful, with miles and miles of mountains in the distance. I was heading west, however, so I turned to walk back down through a field and into an area known as Uncle Jules’ Springbox.
There was a small parking lot at the bend in the road that I had to walk through. I noticed lots of trucks with tall antennae and metal boxes in the back. At first I thought they were electric company trucks. They all looked roughly the same, and there were six to eight of them. As I got closer, I realized that those boxes in the truck beds were actually cages, and some of them had dogs inside. They were such small cages that I couldn’t see the dogs clearly, but I deduced that these were hunting dogs and the cases were probably designed to transport them safely on bumpy forest roads. At least I hoped that was the case. Some hunters were napping in one of the trucks, but I could hear other dogs barking in the distance somewhere in the direction I was headed. It was then that it really clicked for me – I realized that I was walking into an active hunting area! This realization sent a cold chill down my back. Was this really a viable route I was taking?
When I planned this hike, I had thought that all of the trails on the gorge map were solely for hiking, and I did not do enough research to realize that hunting was allowed in some of the areas I would hike through. I was therefore unprepared with any kind of hunters’ orange-colored hat or clothing. I didn’t want to turn back, so instead I resorted to singing whatever songs I could think of at the top of my lungs as I left that meadow and headed into the woods.
Up until this point, my experience with loose dogs on trails has been less than ideal. Now I was walking along with the knowledge that entire packs of dogs were roaming the woods nearby in search of a kill. I wasn’t sure what they were hunting, but wondered what would happen if they heard me, or picked up my scent. Would I become a mid-day snack for a pack of snarling hounds looking to satisfy their bloodlust? I had no idea if these dogs were 5-feet tall Yeti-tackling balls of muscle, or comically short-legged Corgi’s with freakishly large fangs. I know nothing about hunting dogs and the darkness of the truck cages did not assist me in discerning what snarling mongrels lurked in their depths. All I could do was walk on and make noise. A LOT of noise.
It turned out that these particular hunting dogs were just cute little beagle-looking things who had no interest in me whatsoever. Not too far into the woods, I came upon a group of hunters and their dogs sitting down in the middle of the trail. They would have heard me long before they saw me. I was singing Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind,” which probably just served to ratify all of their assumptions about my stupidity in hiking there without some kind of orange clothing. They were very nice, however, and I immediately felt better when I saw the hound dogs. They easily could have starred in a Disney cartoon. They were rather small in size, and I was shocked to hear that they were hunting bears! I couldn’t imagine a bear backing down from even six of those hounds. They said they had treed a bear earlier and were waiting there to see if it might double back. Apparently the hunters know if a bear has been treed by the sound that the dogs make. It’s not clear to me how a bear escapes at that point, but perhaps the “they treed a bear” story is a tale that hunters tell when the dogs really just had no luck at all. I’ll never know.
I know hunting can play an important role in population management, and I, myself, do eat meat on occasion. But, while I admire people who have the skills and fortitude to legally put food on their table by killing it themselves, when I’m hiking, I’m in a totally different mindset. I want to see and appreciate nature – not think of it as food. I found myself rooting for the underdog, or underbear, in this case. I bid the hunters good day, but did not wish them luck! I walked off singing more loudly, secretly hoping that I might encourage the bear not to return.
I made my way over to another social trail called Gulf Contour. I could no longer hear dogs, but I kept up a decent amount of noise-making, just in case. My right shin had begun to hurt much worse at this point, and I seemed unable to find a way of walking comfortably on it. I knew this was not good and that, at this point, it was unlikely to just magically stop hurting while I was still hiking. I figured I was getting shin splints, or some temporary form of them. I was not sure why, and I also didn’t realize that continuing on was going to make them much worse. In the past when I have gotten shin splints, they have evolved more slowly over a week or two of running. At this point, I still thought there was a chance I would wake up in the morning and they would have gone away with a night’s rest.
Gulf Contour crosses over to the Linville Falls Visitor Center. It was a strange feeling being deep in the wilderness, singing to alert bear hunters to my presence, then all of a sudden popping out of the woods to buses full of wobbling, clean-shaven, well-dressed tourists. Not having showered since before my Foothills Trail hike, I’m sure I was quite the olfactory bomb as I crossed over the bridge in the midst of a busload of them. I again had to adjust my route as one of the dotted line trails was marked as closed for some reason, so I walked down a dirt road for a while until I passed the Linville Gorge Information Cabin.
At this point, my shin was really bothering me. I stopped outside the cabin, weighing my options. I decided to carry on, given that there were a number of access points by which I could climb out of the gorge if it became too painful. My plan was to reassess my injury each time I came to an exit point. Ultimately, I continued on and made camp for the night. I figured that I would take some Ibuprofen, get some rest, and that my leg would feel much better in the morning.
The hiking inside the gorge certainly didn’t help my situation any. It was high impact, with lots of rocks and technical maneuvering. I had hoped the trail would just meander along the river, peacefully undulating up and down over soft terrain. Ha! It was exactly the opposite. The views of the river along the way were beautiful though, and I had an incredible campsite right beside its roaring rapids.
Perhaps the biggest disadvantage of camping by a river in a gorge is the inevitable uphill scramble to do your business the next morning. One thing I have learned in hiking thousands of miles is to dig my cat hole the night before! I had to climb high up a cliff to get far enough away from the river to be responsible with my waste, and then I had to find a place soft and flat enough to dig a good hole and be able to squat without tumbling downhill. The climb up that cliff the next morning on my tender shin was painful! I knew it was going to be a long day of hiking to get back to my car, and wondered if I wouldn’t end up needing to cut it short and hitch a ride.
That morning, my shin felt just as bad as the previous afternoon and looked even worse. It appeared inflamed and looked bruised, even though I had not fallen or bumped into anything. I assume it was the inflammation that cause this discoloration. I popped some Ibuprofen and started my day heading south along the river, wincing each time I hit a rock funny or had to boulder hop and land on my right leg.
Around mid-day, I ran into some rangers doing work on the trail. If I had needed it, it was a good opportunity to get a ride out, but I still felt like I could stay the course, so I trudged on. Despite my injury, the fall foliage was gorgeous, and I was looking forward to the river ford that would come towards the end of the hike.
At some point during the afternoon, the pain in my shin subsided quite a bit. It did not return in force until I forded the Linville River and climbed out on the other side. I have always heard that feeling pain, and then feeling nothing, is a bad sign. It concerned me, but I was also relieved and naively let myself believe that perhaps the injury was not so bad after all. The river ford was mellow and very cooling on my shin. The water ranged between ankle and knee deep and was crystal clear. I could have soaked my right leg in that water for an hour, but at that point, I was eager to finish the hike.
After climbing out of the river, it only took me a few minutes to run into a rattlesnake in the middle of the trail leading back to Wolf Pit. The gorge is a perfect timber rattler habitat. That fall day was sunny, dry, and warm. I wasn’t surprised to see the snake, but just happy when it left the trail so that I could get by. Between looking out for snakes and the pain re-emerging in my shin, it was a very slow walk uphill back to the Wolf Pit parking lot.
When I finally got back to my car and packed up, I thought that sitting down in the car would alleviate the aching in my shin. Unfortunately, the drive home from the gorge was quite painful. There was something about the angled position of my right foot on the gas pedal that hurt like the dickens. Shooting pain would occasionally jolt down my shin towards the front of my ankle. But, I made it. I knew by then that this injury was going to take me away from running and hiking for a while.
At the time, I largely felt justified in pushing through. Later, of course, when I had to restrict my activity levels for quite some time, I would have moments of regret for being stubborn and likely worsening the injury. The hiking had been an amazing adventure though, and seldom have I walked in more perfect conditions. I left feeling grateful to have squeezed the trip in before starting the next adventure in moving to Wilmington.
If you have the chance to experience Linville Gorge, I highly recommend it. I’m sure I will go back for further exploration at some point in the future. I’ve included some resources below that may be helpful in your planning. Don’t let my story of injury deter you, as that was a result of pushing myself too hard over multiple hikes rather than something specific to the gorge tread. While the terrain is rugged in some places, it is not what I would consider “ridiculously hard.” However, if you go to Linville Gorge expecting paved trails and a moving sidewalk, you’ll likely be surprised by the dirt and rocks and stuff. I would describe Linville Gorge as the perfect amount of ruggedness. When you hike there, you will feel like you hiked in a wild and remote place, which is exactly what you probably want.
As I write this, months later, I think my right shin is finally healed. I ended up having to lay on the couch for a few weeks, elevating and icing it and chewing Ibuprofen. It is possible that I had a stress fracture, but I have no way of knowing (because I refused to go to a doctor). The shin became quite bruised and discolored on my last day of hiking and remained that way for several weeks. It was definitely the worst case of shin splints I have ever had. I still am not sure what caused it as it didn’t feel like I was pushing myself too hard…. I have since been quite painstaking about slowly ramping up my levels of activity, and I believe that I am fully healed at this point, though I am now working hard to regain some of the fitness I had at the time of the gorge hike.
The Linville Gorge trip was a wonderful capstone to the 2021 hiking season. Since moving to Wilmington, while it is quite flat here, I have explored a number of parks and trails. I will talk about those at some point. At the core of my love for hiking is a love for the combination of seeing new things, enjoying nature, and walking. I love mountains, but I don’t need them to still enjoy walking.
Wilmington has been a nice change of pace from Atlanta. I’ve loved having the beach nearby and the general sense of adventure that comes with moving to a new town. I have a new big adventure on the horizon that I will be writing about soon, and that is going to keep my legs occupied for a while, so stay tuned for that. Below are some short tips on Linville Gorge for those who may want to visit.
To get a feel for the gorge and see my journey, you can watch the short YouTube video I made about my trip through Linville Gorge.
For additional detailed planning, logistics, and route information, watch my video about Planning a Hike at Linville Gorge.
Happy Trails!
–Hungry Cat
Linville Gorge Quick Trip Planning
Permits
–Permits required for overnight camping from May 1 to October 31 on Friday & Saturday nights and holidays.
–Permits are free. Limited to 50 per day, 35 available in advance by phone and 15 reserved for walk-ins at the Linville Information Cabin.
Access
–Parking is free in the public lots in the gorge.
–No regular shuttle provider services the gorge. Most people hike a loop, park and hike out and back, or team up with others to shuttle. Traveling Lite Shuttle & Resupply is probably your best bet if you want to pre-arrange a shuttle in the gorge.
Navigation
–The Avenza Map App is definitely the best map to use for navigating the gorge.
–Download the free app on your phone and search for Linville Gorge Wilderness in the app. The Linville Gorge Wilderness map is also free.
–Use it in airplane mode while on trail and you will still be able to see your location via GPS while using the app.
–PDF printable map (I still recommend the Avenza map over this one)
Gear
–My gear list for both the Foothills Trail and Linville Gorge
**Note that permit and other logistics info is subject to change, so always double check with the latest online information from the US Forest Service as part of your trip planning.
