A 45-year love affair with South Mountains State Park

Saturday, April 26, 1980, was the epitome of “the stuff that dreams are made of” in western North Carolina.

Clear, sharply blue skies. The green of the recently budded leaves, fresh and new. Temperatures in the mid-70s with scarcely a trace of humidity.

I was but 24 years old and had just completed my first two weeks of employment with The News Herald as their county government and political affairs reporter.

With a free Saturday afternoon stretching out in front of me, I decided to make my first visit to South Mountains State Park, at that point only six years old and containing a little less than 6,000 acres.

My chariot at the time was a 1968 two-tone, blue body-white top, Chevy Nova. At one time, it had been an impressive vehicle. That time had passed.

Now, the undercarriage was so eaten up with rust that the highway was visible through the floorboard in the back seat. The engine had a propensity to overheat. The seats were torn, the dashboard cracked. The old girl’s days were clearly numbered, and that number was low. Almost as low as my salary which kept me driving such a vehicle.

Yet it was in this vehicle that I attempted to reach the state park which had, I had been told, a truly spectacular waterfall.

What I had not been told was that at that point the state had not spent one thin dime improving the park’s access road — a road that truly was only suitable for high-clearance, four-wheel drive trucks.

Unaware of what lay ahead, I turned blithely off the paved pleasure of Ward’s Gap Road and onto what started out to be just like so many backroads in Burke County — unpaved but flat and smooth.

My joy did not last for long. As I approached the road’s first crossing of the Jacob Fork River, I realized something quite vital was missing — a bridge.

Yes, the river had to be forded — an activity that I associated with cattle drives and chase scenes from “Gunsmoke” or “Rawhide” but not with transportation in the latter part of the 20th century.

With no other vehicles around in either direction, I hit the water, more quickly than I should and my Nova plowed right across. “Thank God,” I thought naively, “the worst is over.”

Instead, “the worst” was just getting started.

After crossing the river, “flat and smooth” were replaced with “rocky and rough,” and I don’t mean a little rocky nor a little rough. I mean a narrow roadway littered with “iceberg rocks” that protruded a few inches above the surface but that were anchored with two or three feet of stone beneath the ground.

I weaved. I bobbed. I got jostled. The car creaked. The car moaned. Occasionally I would hear a horrible scraping sound. And then, just when I was ready to burst into tears, I came to a second ford of the Jacob Fork River.

The air turned blue with my curses and oaths. Had my mother heard, she would have disowned me on the spot.

This ford was wider, its banks steeper. I plunged on. And smack in the middle of the stream, my Nova got stuck. We were quite literally “dead in the water.”

My curses turned to prayers of supplication. I put the car in reverse. Backed up a little. Then plowed forward again. Somehow, we caught traction and shot forward out of the water.

Just then I noticed the temperature needle on the Nova climbing into the danger zone. The road curved up a steep grade littered with boulders. We nearly made it to the top — nearly.

Instead the Nova faltered, then said, “The Hell with it,” and died. Expired. All efforts at respiration stopped.

Leaving the keys in the car with the windows down in the vain hope that some fool might steal it, I walked the rest of the way to the primitive ranger station and unpaved parking lot.

From there it was about a mile’s hike to High Shoals Falls. The trail was as primitive as the road into the park had been. The elaborate system of bridges, steps, and platforms that mark the trails to the falls today was years away from construction.

Instead there were yellow circles painted on rocks to show the way across the river and up its steep left side.

Like Yosemite Sam who, in one of my favorite Bugs Bunny cartoons, had vowed that he had “paid to see a high diving act and by golly, he was gonna see a high diving act,” I yelled to the wilderness that, “I came to see a waterfall and by golly, I am going to see a waterfall.”

And see a waterfall I did. A 60-foot drop of crystal clear water tumbling over a sheer rock face and into a sparkling pool. Its beauty and its power quite literally took my breath away.

I was enchanted. I was in love. And as the park grew, my love for it grew also. I still recall my first hike to Chestnut Knob and the view it offered of the Piedmont valley and the shining city of Charlotte.

I still remember the first time I hiked around the perimeter of the park — an 18-mile up and down circuit — and how I cooled my aching feet in the numbing waters of the Jacob Fork when I finished my journey.

I remember the day I came face to face with the biggest buck deer I have ever seen and I remember the December afternoon when I slipped on a wet rock while taking a photo of a waterfall off the Sawtooth Trail.

I lost my sunglasses, lost my cap, and ended up soaking wet three miles from my car, but I did not lose my life, thanks to a tree root I was able to grasp.

I love South Mountains State Park and my heart sank when Supt. Lance Huss told me recently that it will take a while longer — an undetermined while longer — before I can tromp those trails again.

That day will come. Not soon enough. But that day will come.

But back to that day in April nearly 45 years ago. I walked back to my Nova and she sat where I had left her, keys dangling in the ignition.

Amazingly, when I turned those keys, the old girl cranked right up. I got her turned around and somehow we made it back out of the park, two fords and innumerable boulders not withstanding.

That Nova died for good in the late autumn of 1980. All attempts at resuscitation failed.

But my love for South Mountains State Park, as unrequited as it may be just now, is stronger than ever.