Slickrock Creek: Hiking into one of North Carolina's Lonely Wildernesses

A little over a month ago I hid a letterbox/hybrid cache along the Dragon Road, Hwy 129, and the cache was promptly attacked by a bear. I ended up taking the family up to Fontana Lake the next weekend and replaced the cache with the same type of container, an empty peanut butter jar. I kind of knew that the container might be what is attracting the bears in the first place, but I didn't have a nother container handy at the moment and figured this time it would be ok. Well, a few weeks later I get a note from a letterboxer that the cache was hijacked by an animal again, probably a bear, and this time the stamp and logbook went missing along with the peanut butter container. So not only was I going to have to replace the container, but now I needed to recarve the stamp and make a new logbook (can't used simple ruled notepads since the lines don't look good for people's stamps). It took a bit of time, but I finally got around to carving up a new stamp and I purchased a decent container that hopefully will be of no interest to bears or any wildlife. Now I just needed an excuse to ride the dragon again.

My excuse wasn't much of one, there is great hiking in Cherokee National Forest and it was a simple matter of finding a hike that looked awesome and picking a day to go when my wife could stay home with the kids. The hike I took an interest in was in the Slickrock Wilderness, also known as the Joyce-Kilmer/Slickrock wilderness. There are two geocaches deep in the wilderness that rarely get found and looked to promise a good day, crossing streams and splashing in waterfalls. I was fully planning on going solo, since my regular hiking partner, Jake, wasn't free this weekend, but then thought I'd see if I could find some geocachers interested in coming with me. Two particular geocachers came to mind, Lullabye4U and Kaput360. I had met them a few times before and they were always very friendly. They also create some of the areas coolest gadget caches, and I knew we'd have loads of good geocaching discussions if we went hiking together. But most importantly, they are good hikers. I often see their names on the hiking geocaches in the Cumberlands, and they were the first (and so far only) finders of my geocaches on the Obed River section of the CT, which is a pretty hefty 14 mile thru-hike. If they could handle that they would surely be interested in this hike wouldn't they?

To be fair, I wasn't exactly sure how long this hike was going to be. My plan was to take trail #42 from the Tapoco trailhead, pass by Lower Falls and GC13HVN at about 3 miles. From there the Slickrock Trail (#42) continues on eventually reaching Wildcat Falls and GC1EM4V which would be our final destination and turn around point. but after a bunch of online searching I couldn't quite figure out how much further along Wildcat Falls was. It looked to be about 4 miles beyond Lower Falls, but with all the meanderings of the stream (and trail?) I was worried it could be more like 6 miles. If it was indeed that far, our roundtrip hike would be 18 miles long, which was pretty ambitious, but still within what I thought would be doable, at least for myself. But would Lullabye and Kaput think so? I contacted them and they seemed eager to give it a try, so I packed up for a long day of hiking, including headlamp, extra flashlights, water purifier and emergency blankets. If we ended up getting caught out. However long the hike was going to be, I wanted to be prepared.

I left the house at 6am and drove solo up the Dragon Road. The plan was to meet at the trailhead at 8am, but I made good enough time that I decided to stop at my Letterbox Cache on the Dragon Road. The letterboxer who found it last had cleaned it up nicely, there were no toys or broken containers laying about, and it looked to be in decent shape. I added my new stamp/logbook container and dropped off a few travel bugs (one with a dragon theme), picked out all the broken pieces of tupperware that remained, and the cache was good to go. Then I was off the meet Lullabye and Kaput. I pulled into the trailhead parking area about 10 minutes early, and they were already there waiting for me. It took me a few minutes to get my kit together, but we were soon off, hitting the trailhead right at 8 o'clock sharp.

Kaput and Lullabye4u at the start of the day

The trail started off nice and wide, a few hundred feet above the lake below and to our right, but soon started climbing up the embankment and getting narrower. At point it got very narrow and looked to be almost entirely eroding away into the steep hillside, but there was always enough tread for us to make steady progress. After a mile or so, it turned up the Slickrock creek drainage and away from the Tennessee River, or Cheoah lake or whatever it is you call that body of water. The river here has been dammed in so many places I get confused as to whether you call it a river or a leak, and if it is a lake, what name it gets. Kaput always just called it "the lake", so maybe I'll stick with that. Once the trail moved up to follow slickrock creek, it immediately earned its namesake, with several sections of slick wet rock that we had to negotiate over. Definitely not the easiest trail around, but not too bad overall. The best part was that since the trail stayed along the creek, we never had much of a steep incline to contend with. Just a gentle grade up the ravine.

We made decent time, and were soon at our first destination, the geocache called Slickrock. I don't often geocache in with a group of people, but when I do, we usually just comb out and whoever finds the cache first just yells something out, usually "found it!". But I had heard of other ways to cache as a group that sounded kind of fun. One method of group geocaching is to use an old childs game called Huckle Buckle Beanstalk. To play this way, when one person finds the geocache, they keep looking for a while, then yell out "huckle buckle beanstalk" and wait in a pre-determined location. The remaining players continue to look until everyone has found the cache. The idea is to allow each cacher a chance to find the container on their own, and get the "full experience". I think I heard about it on the geocaching forums, but we had a small group and Lullabye and Kaput seemed game to try it out.

As luck would have it, I found the geocache first, and after continuing to pretend to search for a bit, I yelled out that I had found it and went to the gravel bar beneath the waterfall to wait for them to make the find. I took my shoes off and waded into the ice cold water, took tons of pictures and ate an apple as the others kept searching. Eventually, I started yelling out hints until they made the find. I thought this game was pretty fun and was grinning ear-to-ear. Lullabye and Kaput were not so amused, as they were sweating over their search while I leisurely relaxed in front of the waterfall. I think some disparaging words were spoken, and it was quickly settled that we wouldn't be playing this "huckeberry foolishness" at our next cache. "But I thought it was fun" I exclaimed. "That's because you found it first," Lullaby retorted. Touché.

Playing Huckle Buckle Beanstalk. Yes, it's a blooper picture!

The waterfall, known as Lower Falls, that we were at was exceedingly nice. I was sorely tempted to take a swim, but resisted the urge knowing that we still had many miles of hiking ahead of us, and not wanting to do all of that in wet shorts.

The trail beyond lower falls involved half a dozen or so stream crossings. The creek wasn't too high, but it was high enough to make the crossings challenging. And the creek also lived up to its name, with the rocks being very slick. Nevertheless, I nimbly hopped across boulders and managed to keep my boots dry at each of the crossings. This eventually became somewhat infuriating for Lullaby and Kaput, who both ended up with wet boots. Sasha was only one who didn't seem to mind getting her feet wet, and was happy to trot across the streams, looking at us like we were crazy.

Getting boots wet

Negotiating one of the many crossings

One of the more creative stream crossings

We didn't see much wildlife along our hike, but I feel like I often don't when I'm hiking with Sasha. She tends to make a lot of noise and alert wildlife to our presence pretty well. Lullabye did spot a nice sized red spotted newt in it's eft stage though.

We also saw a bunch of neat mushroom specimens. Both Lullabye and Kaput seemed pretty interested in mushrooms, and I did my best to recall what little I knew about some of the types of mushrooms we found. There were some very nice bollette species, and of course, many Russalas. Also some bright orange chantrelle like mushrooms growing in the moss along the stream. I'll have to dig up my Mushrooms Demystified book, perhaps even loan it out to them.

We finally reached Wildcat Falls at around 1pm and settled in for a late lunch. I took a quick swim beforehand and the water was icy and refreshing. The pool underneath the waterfall was deep and clear, with a few early autumn leaves floating peacefully around in the eddy currents. The waterfall has a couple different tiers and each with fun bathing opportunities. Alas, it simply was not hot enough outside to merit a long swim, and I was soon very chilled. Lullabye and Kaput looked like they briefly entertained the idea of hopping in as well, but thought the better of it once they were up to their knees.

Wildcat Falls

We found the cache here pretty quickly, despite a not having great satellite coverage and a mostly useless hint of "laurel/boulders" in an area festooned with laurel and boulders. I made the find again, ad now Lullabye and Kaput seem to think I am a super-finder. Really I'm not! I just got lucky this time around. This cache has only been visited 4 times in 7 years, a nice lonely cache to be sure. Man, the geocachers around here don't know what they are missing! The waterfall is gorgeous and remote, pristine and peaceful. What's not to like? I traded out some of the swag, swapping an emergency blanket for the sewing kit, and leaving one of my new signature tokens. I filled up a page in the logbook with some musings, then we rehid the cache well, so that the next adventurous geocachers will have something to enjoy other than the stunning natural scenery.

Group shot in front of the falls

Upper tier

Looking down at the main plunge pool

Lullabye and Kaput in the photo nook

Negotiating the slick rock

A third teir of waterfall about 200' upstream that looked to have an amazing cliff jumping spot. It was heard to get a good picture of this waterfall, but it was just as nice as those below.

As is often the case, the hike back seemed to go faster than the way in. I continued to hop gracefully across the stream crossings as Lullaby and Kaput grumbled at me and got their feet wet yet again. They had changed into dry socks earlier, but those were now wet also. We happily chatted about hiking and geocaching while we hiked and I learned that they are relatively new hikers, getting into it in the last year or so because of geocaching. I think I may have talked them into getting some new gear, like a lightweight water purifier which I had brought with me so we wouldn't have to carry so much water, and good hiking socks. I put in a plug for my favorite hiking sock company, Darn Tough Socks, of Vermont. I can't tout having good socks enough, if you are seriously hiking a lot, you need to take care of your feet, and good socks really do matter. Even more so than good shoes I think. But that's my product placement spiel for now.



It also sounds like Lullabye and Kaput have one heck of a cool geocache series they are working on. The amount of work and thought they put into their caches is incredible and I'm looking forward to seeing the new caches when they come out. As geocachers go, they are pretty new to the game, having started a little over a year ago. And already they have over 1000 finds, and in places around the country and world.  It was quite a treat to be able to go hiking with them and I feel pretty confident that they will play a big role in keeping this game fun for this area for years to come.

Despite making great time on the return trip, we were still all getting tired, especially Sasha who would fall asleep if we stopped for more than 60 seconds. To shorten our return hike, we consulted a trailmap I had with me and decided to take a slightly different trail that would shave maybe a mile off our hike. Trail #45, or the Ike Branch Trail, bypassed Lower Falls and went up over a ridge line before descending down to "the lake" along a steep streambed. It would mean more elevation gain, but promised to get us home a bit quicker, so we went for it. The trail started off fairly steep, and also had quite a bit of treefall. But after several tree crossings, ti leveled off to a reasonable incline and was clear and easy going. Lullabye and Kaput swapped out for dry socks again to try to stave off blisters on their wet feet, and then it was just a steady march up over the ridge and then down to the lake. Turns out trail #45 did save us 0.8 of a mile, but at a cost of 400ft elevation gain. Plus it was much hotter and drier getting away from the stream system. I drained the rest of my water quickly, and was actually sweating pretty hard for the first time all day. Oh how I would have liked to jump into the Lower Falls then, but we had bypassed the falls entirely.

We stumbled back to our cars right at 5:40pm. Tired but still in pretty good spirits. Fresh clothes awaited us in the cars. I asked Lullabye and Kaput if they were going to stop at any caches on the way back, half thinking that perhaps they would want to see my Dragon themed letterbox, but they had only one thought in mind, going straight home and relaxing. Me, I still had a little bit in me... but that's a story for another post.

End of day shot

Some parting thoughts: It was a pleasure to hike with Lullaby and Kaput, I hope we get together for more hikes in the future. They are funny, friendly and excited geocachers and they also really appreaciate a good hike. Seems like these traits aren't so common with most geocachers, so I am grateful that we could get together for this hike. The hike ended up clocking in at 12.8 miles, with about 1500' elevation gain throughout the day. A long hike, but not terribly long in my mind. We also didn't see a single other hiker, even though there were several cars at the trailhead. Makes me want to tackle some more wilderness hikes in this area. There are some more trails and remote and lonely caches out here just waiting for cachers like us to go find them. And if it was up to me, we'd be right back out here next weekend, enjoying another fine fall day.