Gorges State Park
Subnational Park · Sapphire, North Carolina
North Carolina's westernmost state park, and its wettest - the Blue Ridge Escarpment drops two thousand feet in a few miles here and pulls eighty inches of rain a year out of the air, which makes it a temperate rainforest with an extraordinary concentration of waterfalls and rare plants. The state bought the land from Duke Energy in 1999. It sits inside a conservation corridor of more than a hundred thousand acres running eighty miles along the Carolinas line.
976 Grassy Ridge Road, Sapphire, North Carolina, 28774, United States
FREE and open daily, with monthly hours roughly 7 AM to 6 PM in winter and to 9 PM in midsummer. Closed Christmas Day. The visitor centre keeps shorter hours. Camping is backcountry and walk-in only, by permit. ⚠ ACCESS TO RAINBOW FALLS IS THROUGH THE PARK BUT THE FALLS SIT IN NANTAHALA NATIONAL FOREST - different land, same trail, and the drive in from US 64 is winding.
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