Nellie's Falls

Sunday morning, it was lightly raining when we woke up. Sandy and I quickly packed up all our gear and ate breakfast in the car to stay dry. The others from our group were going into Brevard for breakfast, but we had already eaten, so we decided to go get one more waterfall before leaving the area - Nellie's Falls, also called Hidden Falls, a relatively unknown waterfall on Flat Creek upstream from where we had camped. We waded across Flat Creek and turned left almost immediately on an old logging road that headed gradually up. This turn was before the big campsite on the way to Flat Creek Falls. In about a half-mile, we turned left and followed the path closest to the creek. There was another path that led down to the creek and crossed, but we continued straight. At one point, a huge tree had fallen over the path and we had to bushwhack to get around, though it was not too difficult. Finally after about a mile, the trail mostly ended and we saw some marking tape indicating a path heading down to the creek towards the base of the waterfall.

There was a small cascade we couldn’t really see from this side of the creek and the main waterfall was just upstream. We waded across the creek just below this cascade and then headed around a big rock to the base of Nellie’s Falls.

It was bigger than I expected and quite scenic. I got some pictures from different angles and then we started heading back.

Two more creek crossings on Flat Creek and we were back to the car. Everyone else had departed by this time - ours was the only car left. From here, we got back on paved roads. We took NC-281 to US-64 and drove into Brevard and met everybody at the Hub, a new outdoors store near the entrance to Pisgah Forest. We hung out with our friends for a while and then started heading back home. Sandy and I stopped at Las Salsas in Morganton for a big fajita dinner on the way.