Tallulah Gorge

This stop was Tallulah Gorge State Park in northern Georgia. We had three nights here and took it easy the first day to sleep in and recover a bit since the drive day, while it wasn't terribly long it was tough on us (me at least).  Also, we only had one thing we wanted to make sure to do here and that was the gorge trail to the bottom of the gorge.  I took a bunch of pictures, so I'll leave this short and get to them. 

Picture from one of the overlooks, our first day there we drove to the visitor center and scouted out the top part of the trail to get a lay of the land. 

Our campsite

Georgia marks a major milestone for the Munsch's. It's our 47th state we've camped in and only leaves the notorious Oregon left in the lower 48 that we haven't camped.  We've driven through Oregon on our first trip though, so we've been in each state.  To think we've been to all the states (some a few times) in this rapidly deteriorating camper is pretty amazing. Marcus is only 13. Here is the map on the wall in our camper.  There's a jewel sticker for each place we've camped.

We had steaks the first evening to celebrate the accomplishment.

Swim beach at the campground.  It was an interesting beach real long and skinny swim area.

Lucas checking out the beach.
He thought his "fixed" hair cut also made him look psychotic and requested it cut yet again.

Becky cleaned up the sides so it looked less mushroom top fluffy. 
I thought it looked good but he thought it was too close to a mohawk. 

So he requested a full buzz cut. See the sandles at the beach? Lucas got sandles at the last Walmart stop since his old ones broke and were ducted taped together for a few days. He puts the flipflops on getting out of the water as seen here and walked up the beach where we had our stuff. He stops looks down at his flip flops sitting by our bag and the flip flops on his feet and says. "I don't think these are my flip flops", he walks back to the water to return the sandals he stole from the beach.

Our little stair issue. I didn't have the hardware to fix it so it had to wait a day until we could get to yet another hardware store. That first step off the camper was a doozy for a while. Home Depot was only 12 miles away so were able to run up and grab what I needed.  Also it was time for a oil change and they had a express lube nearby so was able to get that out of the way as well. 

Here it is fixed up just drove a bolt through the board and used the lag bold and washer to attach it to the floor in the camper from above. We had overlaid 1/2 plywood over the floor so plenty strong to keep it up and functional. We had done the same thing on the other side when we fixed the camper floor. So that was easy fix and I knew about it on the drive but there was no hurry to fix it.  But after filling water after the not so great drive our water tank leak returned. We were pouring water out the bottom again and when I looked the patch had peeled off on one side.  This was a more immediate need so had to get under the camper and patch that up right away not what I wanted to be doing at the time. So I rage fixed it and it really wasn't as bad as I thought it would be and why I was raging out.  I only needed to remove two bolts this time instead of half the skirt like last time. 

Marcus out taking a picture from the top of the gorge when we were scouting things out before the big hike.

We got a kick out of how big this sign was.  No way we could say we weren't warned.

Picture of the dam above the gorge, if the siren goes off and you're in the gorge they are releasing water and have high water marks up the banks you'd need to make your way to.

Setting off early in the morning for our hike.  Not as early as we had planned, we all overslept by an hour but still pretty early.  We walked in from our campground since the end of the hike was closer to the campground then the beginning, we took the distance early instead of at the end. 

At the visitor center getting our passes for the gorge hike.  They only allow 100 people to hike it a day.  It was a weekday so not too much issue of them being gone.  They say before noon you're pretty good.  But on weekends or holidays they can go right away after they open. We had to go through a little class explaining the route and the hazards and how no one should ever do it, blah blah blah. There are 1000 stairs, a river crossing, bolder hopping, bolder scrambling, another river crossing and then a bolder scramble/climb to get out of the gorge. Something for everyone. 

Samus getting some shots from the top overlooks, he didn't come along yesterday when we checked it out.

Gorge-ous was our word for the day.

Stairs there are a lot of stairs down.  The full route you didn't have to go up the stairs. I was happy about that at first, hey we only go down the stairs not up.  What a silly man I was, I would have killed for some stairs and benches a few hours later in the day.

Family shot on the stairs just getting going everyone is super excited this is going to be so fun.
See the steep railing, my 17 year old is walking down smiling having a good time and puts his butt on said railing and is off like a rocket. He flies down the steep railing and slams into his mother, sending her flying down 3 or 4 stairs. She has know idea what happened but is rolling around in pain.  Sam was stopped by the impact and is in full apology mode. So the mood took a turn quickly. We sat on a bench for a few minutes to do a systems check if everyone was alright and decided to push forward. Becky took quite a shot but probably saved Sam from serious injury, there was no way he'd stop and hitting the end or trying to get off at that speed would have been really bad.

After the stairs there's a suspension bridge over the river. 

It's a legit suspension bridge and made me think of the one in the Big Sioux Recreation Area. Only that one seemed sturdier. 

 

And isn't very far down, this is a good 40 feet or more to the bottom.

After the bridge there are more stairs

At the bottom of the stairs there's a platform to view the falls and a pass only gate to get off the board walk and continue the hike along the bottom of the gorge.

It's rock scrambling/hopping from here.

Along the bottom of the gorge.

It was some serious rock hopping. Taking some deliberate consideration at times on how best to get from one place to the other.

And by rock hopping, I mean rock hopping. This is Luke mid air making one of the jumps. For me jumping wasn't as bad as trying to stick the landing and not have my momentum carry me off the landing rock. The warning class was serious. 

We were getting banged and bruised up.

Some falls from the rocks above

It was a absolutely beautiful hike and the rocks while challenging made it a lot of fun

There weren't only rocks and boulders to contend with, some downed trees made it interesting as well.

At the end of the trail there's a place called sliding rock and there you can swim and slide on the rock.
We get to this waterfall thing it sort of looks like a slide.  We're wondering if we're at the end or not.

We hung out there for a while looking around if we could see a trail out on the other side or not.

No I didn't fall in the water that's all sweat. It's hot and humid out. 

We talk to a couple other hikers.  They were wondering the same thing as us but said "I'm pretty sure if we slid here we'd die", so were continuing on.  We agreed and worked farther downstream as well. 

From below, yeah that wouldn't feel good.

But downstream a little way further we finally hit sliding rock.  A much more manageable slope. 

At first it was just us and the couple of guys we talked to at the last falls, we rested and debated going in. As we waited a large group of kids showed up from the other side.  They were part of a Y camp that had come to slide and swim for a while. I was hot so I slide in first but from pretty low, it felt good but getting out was interesting I was glad they had the rope there. 

Marcus Sliding from farther up they got going pretty fast from the top.

Lucas at the low entry point debating going in.

Becky getting in, she went for it first time from towards the top.

Lucas using the rope.  I went again after a while and getting out this time after so much use it got very slippery on the rock getting out compared to my first time.  I was using the rope the whole way up just in case but it didn't matter all a sudden I took a step and slammed down hard.  My right arm hurt pretty bad and I was done sliding at that point. I also bit it a couple times on the stream cross to get to the other side.  I was starting to have a bad day.

Boys in line at the top, with all the kids it was really crowded.

Samus going Mach 5

Lucas going for it

Like I said I had slipped a couple more times crossing the river and then we started to ascend, I wasn't doing too hot and started to worry Becky and the kids. I think I was having some heat exhaustion issues.  I was just spent, and we were climbing almost straight up using hands and feet to get out of the gorge.  I expected a more gradual climb, but nope it was steep and long to get out of there.  I had to rest a bunch. I had my phone in the bag from the river crossing but finally took it out about halfway up to capture some of the pain. This is a shot looking down.

I'm delirious and Lucas is in the background trying to look at his map.  It got a little wet.

The map was a total loss. I think the temp right now was 87 or something like that but the heat index was 98. 

Becky and Samus hiking up.  Samus hauled our pack up the cliff face for me.

We finally made it out of the gorge we were so excited but still had a long way to hike back but at least it was walking.

Falls from the south rim

And the after shot. We marked the spot we did the before shot but we didn't have the energy to even line up.  Just snap it and let's get home to the camper. After some Gatorade and some real food we came around. We laid around for a hour or two then we headed out to take in a movie.  There was a theatre about 15 miles south of us so we drove there and went to Top Gun Maverick.  Wow, now that is a movie. Highly recommend, we all loved it. 

And that night we slept like dead horses.