HMS Beangle

Well look at that. The first thing we noticed driving into our campsite at Tallulah Gorge State Park was a teardrop trailer in the site next to ours. (The second was that the previous campers at our site hadn’t left on time.) It made my heart happy to see another proponent of the tiny travel life. What really blew our minds though was hearing that she was scheduled to pick up her own Bean Trailer in the spring! Sunny is going to be a great part of the larger Bean family.

When booking, we were surprised to only find one campsite available. That was because the Tallulah Gorge Dam only does a big water release a few times a year, allowing people to experience the roar and volume of the falls as they once were. During this time, kayakers can run the rapids and we were lucky enough to catch the last weekend of this year’s releases.

There are ten different viewing platforms, some on the north and some on the south sides of the gorge. Two of them lead down to a suspension foot bridge, and then even further down to a water’s edge kayak launch area and gorge river trail. Going up and down, we covered about 1,000 steps on a day after the weekend’s crowds had left. My legs were shaking and my lungs groaning when the steps were all said and done. I’m glad we did it; I am in no rush to do it again.

We really enjoyed the lower platform and might have given the gorge floor trail a try, but a special pass was required. We didn’t know what the trail involved, so afterwards we stopped at the Visitor’s Center to ask about the details. The floor trail was open, but it required multiple water crossings which seemed unpleasant for this time of year. Another upper trail that required a pass was closed, as it went through a National Forest area open to seasonal hunting. Getting shot at does indeed seem like a bad idea.

Down below, you get a good view of the rock layers, faulting, and erosion. We spend a lot of time thinking about the geological processes that have gone into making the dramatic landscapes all around us.

At some point, this seating area and a few others were built along the viewing trails we stopped here for a snack, munching our apples with a pretty remarkable view of an upper viewing platform and the climbing wall below it directly in front of us.

A local fly fishing outfitter, in nearby Clayton, gave Jeff directions to a quiet stream that often has good fishing. It’s a bit late in the season, but he never seems to mind so long as he can swing a rod across a gurgling river. I just love to watch the snap and swish of a fly rod, in between chapters of a good book. Any other fly fishing anglers here?

After Jeff was done fishing, we decided to go on a walk in the nearby National Forest. About a 1/2 mile in, we remembered that its hunting season and that hunting is allowed in most National Forests. We beat a hasty retreat.

Our only complaint about our stay has to due with the unsupervised kids on the last weekend. Now I get it, we’re decades past the little kids stage. Parents to an only, we were also never used to being around loads of kids. I think we can take issue, however, to a passel of young kids screaming, running, and riding bikes through the campground and trashing the bathrooms until 11:30pm. The parents at the four different sites, we saw, were busy tying one on and the camp host was nowhere to be seen. What do you think, too much to ask?

Yes, I take quiet hours seriously. I want to relax and sleep. The kids themselves were friendly, especially after I rendered first aid to one who crashed his bike, but they really needed some adult supervision.