Accessibility – Hard
Height – 35′
Distance – 3.0
Beauty – 8
Photo rating – 6
Solitude – 9
GPS Info: LAT 35.30747 LONG -82.29362
Last Updated – 12-27-2024
Home Alphabetical Listing Numerical Listing Location Listing Green River GL
Where to park: Parking is on the side of Green River Cove Road at 35.29514, -82.28347. There is a wide pullout here and it is across from an old logging grade that is going to be the starting point of this hike.
The hike: Across the street from where you parked, an old logging road heads up the grade. From Green River Cove Road until it tops out is about 0.7 miles with a gain of close to 500 feet, The road was in decent shape back in 2021, but these things can change over time, especially after Hurricane Helene. After the climb, the road levels out for nearly 0.4 miles as it heads toward Laurel Branch. My visit was in February, so the woods were open and easy to manage. At 1.1 miles, the road is going to veer away from the creek, and this is when we dropped off the right side of the road and scrambled down to the creek. It wasn’t hard getting to the creel, and following it upstream didn’t present any issues. We came to our first waterfall a quarter of a mile from where we hit the creek and Gamelands Falls was scarcely another tenth of a mile upstream.
I’m not trying to oversimplify this hike, and there are a lot of roads that intersected the one we were following, but we had a pin for the falls, and this made it easy to figure out which road to take. The roads are a bit of a maze at times, and having some pins dropped can keep you on track for a hike like this. Gamelands Falls was a pleasant surprise and Green Wall Falls, the waterfall about 0.1 miles downstream was a great bonus. These are on my list to revisit at some point in 2025.
Gamelands Falls requires more than one picture and I need to get back to this one when the world is green. If it looks this good with the world dead, I can only imagine how it looks when everything is bright and green.
