Themed Tours for Friends

As we have settled into a nice sized home and have ample room for visiting guests, I have started developing thematic tours of various Asheville pleasures. These include consignment shopping tours, chocolate tours, beer tours, coffee shoppe tours, wine tasting tours, hiking options, and waterfall tours. Many of these tours have been crafted as a result of experiences with friends who have already visited. For example, I have discovered that my chocolate tour may be a little intense and the sugar high keeps people up very late. Fortunately we managed to figured out that a different coffee shoppe each morning was a much better way to handle that type of exploration. If four chocolate encounters puts somebody into an altered state, God only knows what ten coffee shoppes in a row could do.....

Today was the first run of the waterfall tour, which I believe was successful. Starting out very early, we got a gorgeous view of the post-sunrise hour.

After several pull-off experiences staring across the mountain top horizon, we got to the edge of waterfall territory. While western North Carolina is flooded (ha!) with waterfalls, Pisgah National Park is especially full of them, numbering over 100. This overwhelming number drove me to find a waterfall map that saved us many errant hours of walking fruitlessly in woods for no reason. Red dots marked the less scenic and annoying-to-reach waterfalls, while the friendly blue ones drew our interest. Additionally, there were helpful hiking instructions such as "loop hike combines Buckhorn Gap Trail and Avery Creek train, passing confusing side paths and junctions".... major red flag. Thank you map! There were additionally helpful notes that identified waterfalls that could be seen from the road, which strongly piqued our interest.

This is Skinny Dip Falls, and although we were tempted to turn back after half a mile or so because we thought maybe the trail maker thought we simply wanted to get our exercise (ha!), but the sound of the roaring waterfall kept us moving. It was worth it, but pretty slippery rock trail that made us grateful for wearing proper hiking boots.

Second Falls wasn't very far from Skinny Dip Falls and was connected via car jaunt to the next pull off :) Nice little walk down, although the stairs at the end were enough to blow up lungs. Apparently Upper Falls was very close in relation, but we voted against the extra 1.5 miles.

Looking Glass Falls is one of my favourites and is in close proximity (20 minutes by car) to the other waterfalls, and many more really. This is most beautiful in winter, but always stunning ... and close to the road. Really close.

This concludes the first effort at the waterfall tour. May there be many more tweaks.