Maggie Valley

Our anniversary trip to Maggie Valley, NC. We had a lot of fun.... we hiked a bunch and had our "relaxing" time just driving the mountains.

Maggie Valley was a very cute, but odd town. We couldn't really figure it out, but we are guessing that it must be a good midpoint in the mountains for motorcycles. There were a TON and all the of the motels (and yes, motels, there were no hotels) had motorcycle covered parking places! And all of them had rocking chairs next to every room and people actually sat out there and rocked and watched the cars drive by.... weird.

"Maggie" walked the town every morning! All of their "paraphernalia" was a woman dressed just like this!

We drove to Bryson City to go hiking and on the way their we passed by the most awesome thing in the world!!!!! SANTA LAND!!!!!

Baby reindeer

Bryson City, NC... very cute little town!

We hiked Deep Creek Trail. We would love to come back here and float down the creek. There were tons of people at the camp ground and I think they just did it over and over and over again all day. It looked like fun (even though the water was Fa-Reezing).

The first waterfall...

The start of our half mile of straight up hike!

Second waterfall... Jason had me climb down a cliff that we were supposed to to stand in the waterfall

Looking down the waterfall standing in it!

At the bottom of the waterfall we were just standing in.

Then we went and hiked Knobwater Rock.... we thought the other one was straight up???!!!!! Well, this one was really straight up and with rocks. There wasn't a normal path. It was tough, but fun!

Knobwater Rock

View from the top... there were storms coming in so it wasn't a clear view, but still pretty

View of Maggie Valley

A look at what the trail looked like

Jason found a "man cave"

The second day we were there it was cloudy and rainy. We decided to just go drive the Blue Ridge Parkway. We thought we would just drive a little way and then turn around, but it was so neat and pretty (even with the clouds) that we made it all the way to another waterfall that we wanted to see.

We were even with the clouds

The clouds were really thick at some points... there is a mountain right there which was probably only 50 yards away!

A semi-clear overlook

We stopped at this overlook and it happened to be Devil's Courthouse, so we hiked it. That is the top behind us.

Views from the top

Then we kept driving to the waterfall... Graveyard Fields. We hiked down a little ways and found a cute creek where people were stopping to play in (again water was freezing and it was cold outside).

Then on the other side of the creek we enter back into the woods to find this.... would have rather known before I started instead halfway through!!! HAHA

Got to the waterfall as it started raining.... we were drenched by the time we got back to the car!

That night we went to dinner in Asheville... it was really nice and I ate ELK!! It tasted like steak, but neat to be able to say I have had it.