Ed invited us on this hike he was leading for the Retired Citizens. We had a group of 10. Jean and I were potentially the youngsters of the group, and we may have had two 80-year-olds. The weather was clear and temps started around freezing and would warm up to mid-40s.
Ed
planned to do a loop in the same area as last fall’s Woolly Tops-Little Laurel
hike, but swapping the tough upper Woolly Tops and Little Laurel segments for the
easy way up the Cow Flats manway. Most of the route is manway on the 1931 map,
except for a short trailless segment in a saddle on the west side of Bald Top
Ridge. The Cow Flats section received “elf maintenance.” I took a GPS track and pictures, plus tracked most of the hike in
Maprika.
Chimney at the Huff Place.
We
made a short shuttle from the parking spaces at Plemons Cemetery. We started downstream on a manway on the south bank of the creek.
In a quarter mile we turned hard left onto another manway and climbed up
the nose of Bald Top Ridge. With much help from the elves’ work, we swung around
the nose of Bald Top into Cow Flats, where there weren’t any cows and it wasn’t
flat. There was an old homesite just above where we joined an unnamed creek.
This was home to a branch of the Whaley family (Ed had details on the residents
of all the home sites we would visit.) There was another Lindsey homesite not
far above. Both had collapsed chimney piles and small amounts of household artifacts.
Above the second homesite the manway turned left and east to head up a side branch
to another homesite that we did not visit.
The
elf work filled in the gap between manways, and we wove our way up the stream
bed and through the rhodo straight into the sun to reach a small saddle in a
spur of Bald Top Ridge. It was warming up into the “comfortable” range, and we
debated the saddle as a lunch spot, but decided to move on. The descent was
essentially a rhodo tunnel, impenetrable without elf maintenance. Don’t try to
cross the pass if you can’t find the tunnel! I took waypoints where the tunnel
crossed the creek and where the tunnel emerged into the open forest of the flats at the lower end of Woolly Tops Branch. It was a dry, sunny spot
so we stopped there for a brief lunch. Because the mouth of the rhodo tunnel
would be tough to find from the Woolly Tops side, navigating this loop would be
much easier going clockwise.
Jean at the Bohannon Place.
Next
was the double chimney of the old Huff (Andy opened the Mountain View Hotel and
Jack Huff operated Mt LeConte Lodge for 35 years) place. Again, there was a
modest collection of domestic artifacts. I’d been here in November 2024 with Ed
and Mike scouting a route from Woolly Tops Branch into Little Laurel Creek.
This time we stayed closer to Woolly Tops Branch and followed an old road down
to False Gap Prong. There is a final home site (Bohannon) near the junction.
Grave of a Revolutionary War Soldier.
The
route from the Huff homesite back to the road is practically a maintained trail.
We cruised past one side road leading to a bridge abutment by the river, and
enjoyed the impressively large rock stacked walls, still neat and square despite
nearly a hundred years of neglect. The last section descended close to Porters
Creek offering views of this wildly tumbling creek and its giant rocks. We
stopped to visit Plemons Cemetery with graves old enough to hold Revolutionary War
veterans. Ed also showed pictures and told stories about the church, school
(look for the concrete footers), and hotel that were once located in the
precious flat land at the confluence of Porters Creek and False Gap Prong.
View up Porters Creek.
My
GPS recorded 3.8 miles and 1,080’ feet of climbing making Cow Flats a relatively
easy off-trail hike, but one filled with interesting features and beautiful
scenery.
