For our first full day of the trip, we drove out to Table Rock Mountain, which sits atop the Linville Gorge and promised excellent views. The drive there was disconcerting: we were on a very long and twisty gravel road, basically switchbacks up and through the mountains. It was at least less stressful once we passed a car coming down and we were assured that we were on the right track. This photo makes it look easy, but this was one of the few straight stretches. The kids were very stressed out and nervous on the ride, because they could see the drop-offs on the side of the road, and weren't quite sure if they could trust Zac to not just randomly careen down the cliff.
We finally arrived at the trailhead parking lot and set off on our very short hike (about 1 mile) to the summit. But in true Arcaro family fashion, we can make a short hike last all day, because we like to play.
I picked this hike because it promised amazing views almost the whole way.
The beginning of the hike was quite chilly, with lots of cloud cover and cold winds.
We do love to stand on rocks.
It was a bit windy up on top!
We spent a long time just hanging out on this little ridge next to the main peak. We had the place mostly to ourselves, so we snacked and enjoyed the views.
Eventually we returned to the main path to summit the mountain, but were soon lured off the path again by interesting rocks and caves. We ended up climbing up here and getting to the summit the back way. The nice thing about this approach was that we got off the well-trodden path and could feel like we had the mountain to ourselves.
Here we are at the top finally, and the kids loved scrambling over the boulders.
We finally reached the top, but it was a bit nerve-wracking because we had to look around for a while to find the official path back down. Plus we'd left all our backpacks at the bottom of the first rocky cliff we climbed so we were without food and water (my nightmare!).
We successfully made it back to the main path and eventually reunited with our backpacks. We drank and snacked and when we were reenergized, we began our beautiful decent.
