{"id":199,"date":"2009-06-06T19:31:16","date_gmt":"2009-06-07T00:31:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mrfs.net\/blog\/?p=199"},"modified":"2009-06-11T19:49:01","modified_gmt":"2009-06-12T00:49:01","slug":"thompson-creek-pilot-rock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mrfs.net\/blog\/?p=199","title":{"rendered":"Thompson Creek \/ Pilot Rock"},"content":{"rendered":"
This hike was a loop where we parked at Grassy Cove, walked a mile along Yellow Gap Road to the Thompson Creek trail, followed this up to the top end and returned to Grassy Cove on the Pilot Rock trail.<\/div>\n
\"Thompson
Thompson Creek trail junction<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0Thompson Creek trail is not heavily used at all.\u00a0 We saw almost no signs of any recent use.\u00a0\u00a0 The trail is a bit foreboding on a map as it ascends almost 1800 feet vertically in just 2.4 miles.\u00a0\u00a0 Both our topo map and our pisgah forest trail map show this trail as ascending right up the center of Thompson ridge.\u00a0\u00a0 This is no longer accurate.\u00a0 After crossing the tributary the trail ascends along Thompson Creek – rarely going out of sight of the water.\u00a0 At the cross trail we backtracked to see how far our topo map was off.\u00a0 The old trail along the ridge is still there and can be fairly easily discerned (with some minor bushwhacking).\u00a0 The trail up to the Pisgah Inn also still exists.\u00a0 The traverse across the Thompson Creek headwaters is the most difficult portion.<\/p>\n

\"Mountain
Mountain Laurel tunnel<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The lower portion of Thompson Creek was completely hemmed in by flowering mountain laurels.\u00a0 The trail starts just across from the Pink Beds and the laurels definately carry over.\u00a0\u00a0 The ascent along the creek is not really all that bad.\u00a0 The hideously steep bit is a series of switchbacks onto Laurel Mountain near the top of the trail.\u00a0 We had hiking poles with us and still found this very challenging.\u00a0 Ultimately, the Thompson Creek trail ends at the Pilot Rock trail about a mile from the Blue Ridge Parkway.<\/p>\n

\"Speckled
Speckled Wood Lily<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Instead, we turned south and came back down on the generally easier Pilot Rock trail.\u00a0 There are some difficult rocky switchbacks on this trail and it’s amazing that mountain bikers managed to make it down and across some of the boulder fields.\u00a0\u00a0 The trail traverses the top of Pilot Rock which we more or less completely failed to notice.\u00a0\u00a0 Ok, that’s not exactly true.\u00a0 We stood there for a moment and wondered if this were the top of Pilot Rock and then decided it wasn’t dramatic enough so we moved on.\u00a0\u00a0 Oh well.\u00a0\u00a0 The roundtrip hike with the forest road is about 6 miles.\u00a0 We also followed parts of the old abandonded trail just because it was on the 1986 topo quad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This hike was a loop where we parked at Grassy Cove, walked a mile along Yellow Gap Road to the Thompson Creek trail, followed this up to the top end and returned to Grassy Cove on the Pilot Rock trail. \u00a0Thompson Creek trail is not heavily used at all.\u00a0 We saw almost no signs of … Continue reading Thompson Creek \/ Pilot Rock<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hiking","category-pisgah-nf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mrfs.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mrfs.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mrfs.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mrfs.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mrfs.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=199"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/mrfs.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":210,"href":"http:\/\/mrfs.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions\/210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mrfs.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mrfs.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mrfs.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}