Distance:
9.6
miles
Difficulty Rating:
mod overall, but rocky in spots
Leaders: Rick &
Brenda Harris, 423-253-6358 (h), 513-260-1184 (c),
HarrisRi@aol.com
Brief Description:
Bald River Falls is one of the most
spectacular falls in Tennessee. The falls is right along Tellico River Road.
Lately the water has been very high from all the rain. See the videos here
(Bald River Falls) and here (Bald River Falls from the side)
and here (Baby
Falls). We will be hiking the trail from the Bald River Falls parking lot to
Bald River Road and back. The trail goes through the Bald River Gorge and
there are several other falls along the trail besides the main falls. The
trail has recently been rehabilitated by SAWS and a college group, so it
should be in great condition. The current weather prediction is that it will
be sunny and about 50 degrees on Saturday.
Meeting Place:
Call
Rick or Brenda Harris no later 8:30 p.m. Friday evening January 27 if you are
interested in attending.
Plans are to meet at the Falls parking lot at 8:30 AM. Those coming from
Cleveland might want to work out a carpool. Since Rick and Brenda live in
Tellico Plains, the carpool will be up to the Cleveland folks coming on the
hike.
Trail Description:
Information on the trail is on our website at
this link.
Post-Trip Report:
OK, this was a weird trip. We had people coming and going all day. But the
scenery was fantastic. The water was high from all the recent rains and the
falls were quite awesome. All of them. We went by several water falls as we
traveled up the riverside trail. We started out as 5 hikers (Rick & Brenda
Harris, Dave and Debbie Flower, Rick Foster), but after lunch, 2 other
hikers (Bill Edmondson and his friend Clyde Allmond) caught up with us. They
wanted to take their time for fear we would be hiking too fast. Then a
family hiked by going the opposite
direction telling us that there were two
hikers waiting for us up at the Bald River Road Bridge. We suspect they were
Bill Hodge and Jim Sirmans, but they were gone by the time we got to the
bridge. Then on our hike back we ran into yet one more hiker (Jim Adams) who
also wanted to take it slow because of a recent knee replacement. So in all
I think there were 10 of us hikers, we just were not all together. It was a
great day for hiking. The day was mostly sunny with highs in the mid-40s.
The trail was in excellent shape, due the the hard work of Bill Hodge and
SAWS (Southern Appalachian Wilderness Stewards) who had a college crew spend
several days working on repairing sidehill in several sections along the
trail just a couple of weeks ago.
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