I decided to leave a day early because of the heavy rain
forecast for Cleveland on Sunday. That turned out a good choice since Saturday
was sunny & cool. Since I was planning to visit my friends Greg and Sandy
Lewis in SC on Monday I had an extra day and that worked out well also. I did
the same thing I did last year. Overnighted at a Lowes in Galax, VA, it was very
quiet and had good Wi-Fi. A mile down the road there is a great Mexican
restaurant and had the same Mexican stir fry as last year.
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| Chestnut Creek Falls |
The New River Trail
starts in Galax and follows the beautiful little Chestnut Creek for 10 miles
down to the New River and then 40 miles along the New.
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| Trail Tunnel |
Last year they were replacing 3
bridges so you couldn’t take the trail downstream along the New River. You
could only go upstream 5 miles to the town of Fries.
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| Both Directions Closed |
There were no signs of hurricane of flood damage along
Chestnut Creek so I was hoping to go downstream 2-1/2 mi to Byllesby Dam.
It
turned out both directions were blocked since the hurricane’s big flood took
out parts of the upstream trail. The downstream trail totally washed out
hundreds of tons of gravel destroying the trail that they had repaired last
year. It may be finished next year a worker told me.
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| Conflunce of New & Creek |
I decided to drive a few hours to Forest City, NC so I would only have 2 more hours to drive in the morning. My GPS decided to give me a shortcut that I knew would be interesting when I saw a sign that said no semi-trucks. It was a five mile long narrow switchback road down the mountain to I-77. Luckily only a few cars were coming up hill.