The Beauty Around Us

West Virginia and North Carolina Vacation – Day 7 of 9: Cullasaja Gorge Waterfalls

By Linda G. on June 5, 2015

We spent the better part of 10 hours chasing waterfalls on Friday, May 15th.  After a delicious breakfast at Joey’s Pancake House in Maggie Valley, we began our tour of waterfalls.  This blog post shares photographs and videos of the first four waterfalls that we saw.

U.S. Route 64 tightly twists and turns its way along the Cullasaja River Gorge, which is part of the Nantahala National Forest.   We stopped at four Cullasaja River Gorge waterfalls:

• Cullasaja Falls
• Quarry Falls
• Dry Falls
• Bridal Veil Falls

Cullasaja Falls is located along a very dangerous stretch of Hwy 64. The 250′ waterfall is viewable from the road, but there is only a small pull off area.  Make sure that you pull completely off the road!   Tractor trailers use this section of road and they need both lanes to get around these curves. You will have the view of the waterfall in the still image and video seen below from the pull off area.

Quarry Falls (also known as Upper Cullasaja Falls) is another roadside waterfall.  Quarry Falls is a 20-foot high, multi-tiered waterfall.

The 75-foot high Dry Falls earned its name because you can take a trail to walk behind the falls and not get wet (well, not too wet).

 

We didn’t walk behind the waterfall on this trip, although we did so last year when we visited this waterfall.

Bridal Veil Falls is a 45-foot waterfall that has the distinction of being the only waterfall in North Carolina that one can drive a vehicle under.

We spent a long time at Bridal Falls waiting for the cars in the first photograph to continue on their way!  As a result, after taking the second photograph, I forgot to take a video of the falling water!

In my next vacation blog post, I will share photographs of additional waterfalls that we saw during the day.