Whitewater River: >> revisited
4 June 2004
Although I had visited Whitewater in the past, I had
never explored it in any detail. This is a Friday,
true, but we have started a 4 day work week in the
district and so, on a whim, Rhee and I decided to
look at a spot that she used to visit as a child. The
river has two spectacular falls, an upper and a
lower, naturally. Access to the lower falls is
forbidden because of the danger. The upper falls has
a look out access point created for the purpose of
viewing. There is also a winding path, replete with
switchbacks, that descends 600+ feet to the base of
the falls. There visitors will cross over a log
bridge and may continue on what is now known as the
Foothills Trail, or at least a portion of it. The
actual trail is quite long. The upper falls also is
quite dangerous if one is foolish enough to access
the top and then decided to attempt to scale down it
to the bottom. A few unfortunates have made more than
a rapid descent. So far none have survived under
those conditions.
The river has a good population of rainbow and
brown trout and fishing can be pretty good at times.
The fish are natives. I don't know of any access
points for stocking hatchery fish. Don't go there if
you're planning to stock your freezer.
Rhee and I found a place to pull off the road, get into our fishing attire and hike down to the river. The first place we accessed had a nice pool, looked promising, but yielded no takers. Studying the river, I noticed that the river bottom was primarily solid rock, worn smooth by who knows how many years of water flowing over the surface. Yes, there were all sizes of rocks and that was to be expected as a by product of the years of weathering. But, I mean the river had literally carved its channel out of solid rock. The only reason I mention this, of course, is to comment that a dry rock like this is slippery underneath felt-soled wading shoes. Who'd a thunk it?
6 June 2004
Now for the second part.
Thinking we deserved seconds, we journeyed back. Some
other people had already established squatter's
rights, but they weren't doing anything more than
just general messing around, so we decided to
out-wait them. It didn't take long. Heading back to
the home of the brave rainbow, I tried once more, but
apparently the lesson had taken as I was effectively
ignored. Good! I guess.
Deciding to explore, we dropped down to the next pool which produced no results (often this is a matter of finding the correct location from which to cast). I wanted to go on downstream, knowing that we were very close to the top of Whitewater falls. Now this has to be a male thing: Rhee had no inclination to scramble into parts unknown, whereas I can't help myself. I gotta know! So, climbing with handholds on Rhodendron roots primarily, I made my way up to a path heading the right direction and I was not disappointed. I didn't go far before descending back to the river and found myself only about 60 yards below Rhee, where she had decided to stay and put in some reading time.
But at that point, I could see around the bend and the view of the river ended quite abruptly. This was it. Wading a short distance put me on an overlook at the very top of Whitewater's upper falls. What a view! Downward, I saw small figures playing in a pool. Straight out I had no trouble viewing the outlook point that the State had provided to visitors. Unfortunately, no one was there to take my picture as a conquering hero. Guess I'm not ready for prime time. And outward, I could see Lake Jocasee. Oh, man. Not much else a body could add to that. It was, of course, awe-inspiring.
So, making my way back to Rhee, after determining
that we were not ready to head home just yet, we
decided to take a quick look upstream above the
bridge that carried the road to Cashiers, NC. Nothing
for a long time, until hitting that combination of
water that you just know has to have fish in it. The
upshot was that I managed to connect with 3 lovely
brown trout. They weren't very big, but a brown trout
is a brown trout. They have the highest IQ, so they
say. I would have felt bad about taking advantage of
them, but since I released them all, I didn't.
W O O F
