Graveyard Fields

Trail description

A 3 km loop with about 60 m of climbing from the Blue Ridge Parkway through Graveyard Fields, a flat valley more than 1,500 m up in the Great Balsam Mountains of western North Carolina. The valley is ringed by peaks over 1,800 m, among them Black Balsam Knob, Tennent Mountain and Sam Knob, which feed the Yellowstone Prong of the Pigeon River. The stream drops over three waterfalls in the valley, Upper Falls, Second Falls and Yellowstone Falls. The name may date from a great windstorm that felled hundreds of spruce and fir trees, leaving moss-covered stumps that resembled graves.

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