I blame the waterfall.
Rainbow Falls is a wide curtain of water that drops 150 feet over a sheer granite cliff on the Horsepasture River. It’s something you’d find on a magazine cover, or in a commercial for a really fresh deodorant, and it sits just outside the border of Gorges State Park. Hike the trail through the park, and you can swim in clear pools, rock-hop between boulders, and jump from a ledge off the side of the falls. It’s great fun … and it’s where I lost my wedding ring. On the first anniversary of that wedding, no less.
I was frolicking in the river with my wife. The water was cold. My hands shriveled. And I was so distracted by the utter beauty of it all that I didn’t even notice the ring slip from my finger. I blame the waterfall. But maybe I should blame Gorges State Park, a land so wild that it’s no place for nice things like wedding rings.
Gorges protects a 7,100-acre slice of the Blue Ridge Escarpment, a geological wonder where the landscape shifts dramatically from rolling Piedmont to towering mountains. That shift happens fast, with elevations rising 2,000 feet like a Great Blue Wall, as locals put it. The park encapsulates a handful of creeks and rivers that drop off of that wall, carving deep scars through the mountains as gravity pulls them toward Lake Jocassee in South Carolina. Waterfalls happen a lot here. You can see a couple of doozies by hiking Rainbow Falls Trail, but the real gems lie deeper in the park, where some of the dramatic drops aren’t even on the map. Imagine that: a state park with treasures that it doesn’t brag about! Gorges is like that — wild, unbridled.
Most state parks are loaded with nature trails and electrical hookups, facilities that attract RVers and elementary school field trips. They’re to be cherished, but it’s hard to get lost and hypothermic on a quarter-mile nature trail. Gorges State Park runs counter to these stereotypes. It is a rugged area of rivers, canyons, and waterfalls that defies expectations. I love it because it still holds mysteries and big adventures.
And a tiny wedding ring sitting on the bottom of the Horsepasture River.
Gorges State Park
976 Grassy Ridge Road
Sapphire, NC 28774
(828) 966-9099
ncparks.gov/gorges-state-park
To commemorate our 90th anniversary, we’ve compiled a time line that highlights the stories, contributors, and themes that have shaped this magazine — and your view of the Old North State — using nine decades of our own words.
From its northernmost point in Corolla to its southern terminus on Cedar Island, this scenic byway — bound between sound and sea — links the islands and communities of the Outer Banks.
Us? An icon? Well, after 90 years and more than 2,000 issues celebrating North Carolina from mountains to coast, we hope you’ll agree that we’ve earned the title.
After nearly a century — or just a couple of years — these seafood restaurants have become coastal icons, the places we know, love, and return to again and again.
