North Alabama Sierra Club
PISGAH GORGE DAYHIKE TRIP
Location: Jackson County, Alabama: Little Bryant Creek, Bryant Creek, Jones Creek – Henager Quadrangle
Type: Dayhike Rating: Strenuous Date(s): June 3, 2006
Travel Time (one-way): 1 hour
Trailhead: <>
Advertisement: Saturday, June 3. 13th Annual Pisgah Gorge Rock Hop. Strenuous. Waterfalls, boulders big as houses, spiders big as dinner plates, swimming, ticks, snakes, poison ivy, everything! The most beautiful scenery in Alabama is worth it! Leader approval required. Sam Denham 539-1033(h), 961-0436(w).
In Attendance: 8
Write-up / Notable Events:
A beautiful day, after a week of almost daily thunderstorms had left Bryant and Little Bryant Creeks at just the perfect level for the waterfalls to be fantastic. We hiked from Pisgah Town Park, entering the gorge at the old mill dam, walked downstream to the junction with Bryant Creek, where we ate lunch and then turned upstream to walk all the way to the waterfall below David Patterson's house, where, after swimming and playing in the waterfall, we emerged at David log cabin where we had left a car. (David had moved his log cabin from Tennessee piece by piece and reconstructed it. The logs go back to mid 1800's.) David Patterson offered us soft drinks and a nice place to change out of our wet clothes. One attendee lost his two brand-new trekking poles somewhere between the third waterfall and the lunch spot, so if anybody finds them, contact the trip leader.
Supper on the way back home at the Liberty Restaurant (meat and three) in Scottsboro, and ice cream at the Dairy Dip next door.
Some research on the Henagar quadrangle topo map shows that the gorge depth at the point where we ate lunch was 360 feet, and 140 feet at the point where we climbed out at the David Patterson waterfall. The geology was all sandstone, (limestone layers do not appear until about 1/4 mile down Jones Creek towards the Tennessee River. Notable wildlife along the way were a big turtle, a huge pink bracket fungus, and two snakes. Total length of the hike was about 0.9 miles, although it took us 5 hours to hike it.
At one point where we were gazing up from the bottom to the top of the bluffs, someone exclaimed in an insistent tone, "This is better than the Walls of Jericho." Note that this is the 13th year in a row for this hike, but in the early years before we knew David Patterson we hiked from the dam to the Patterson waterfall and back to the dam (twice the distance that was done today!)
Photos:
Newspaper Write-up:
6/18/2006 Huntsvillle Times Article