Hiking Trip to Stone Door

Over the past few months we’ve been going on little hikes whenever a dry weekend presented itself. We’ve been going on short hiking trips to Sipsey, Monte Sano and Land Trust trails. Our goal, to build up strength and endurance to be able to take on the more interesting hiking destinations around. Granted, Sipsey is a pretty interesting place, but we haven’t been able to take on the more interesting trails just yet.
Today (actually, last Saturday now) we decided to push ourselves to the next level, and take on a chunk of South Cumberland Recreation Area: Stone Door/Greeter Falls area. Joe knew about this place because it was his first experience with long distance hiking as a boy scout at age 12. Those were fond, yet painful memories since he had no idea what he was getting himself into, a 70 mile hike in one week.
The first leg of our trip took us down the Laurel Trail, 3 miles to the next trailhead. Joe remembered that this trail seemed to last forever, and that hasn’t changed after 18 years. The next leg of our hike took us to Greeter Falls. This trail was only a mile, but much more interesting. We had to cross a swingy, bouncy bridge over an impressive waterfall, Boardtree Falls. The trail then took us along a dynamic route along the base of a bluff line under multiple stone overhangs and through some fun boulder gardens.
Greeter Falls was definitely the highlight of today’s hike. It is split up into two waterfalls, the upper falls and lower falls. The upper falls was impressive, but it was only a primer to what we were about to see at the lower falls. Getting to the lower falls was an adventure in itself. We had to climb down a 100+ foot sheer cliff by way of spiral staircase. Wow, we have never seen a spiral staircase on a hiking trail before. After the spiral staircase, a set of wooden steps down, leading to a grand staircase down to the plunge pool. After all of the rain we’ve had lately, the waterfall was quite impressive. The site, along with the breeze and the roaring, thundering sound was breathtaking. We’re glad we came here.
The Greeter Falls hike was a spur off of our loop. We hiked back to our loop and continued along the Big Creek Rim Trail 3.2 miles to Great Stone Door. Those 3 miles were by far the longest 3 miles of the day. Joe somehow seems to recall this trail being shorter, but we were not sure what he was thinking eighteen years ago. Wow, has it really been that long? By the time we got to Stone Door, our feet were about to fall off and we could’ve drank an ocean. Of course when we got to Stone Door, we had to hike to the bottom and back since we were there. I guess we should have counted how many steps there were to the bottom and back. It felt like a hundred, especially after hiking those 3.2 miles. We just took it easy on the last mile back to the car.
When we started hiking today, we thought we would be hiking for five, maybe six miles, but we ended up hiking over 9 miles. The longest we’ve hiked before this in our marriage, probably since Joe was in Russia was three miles total. We probably will be feeling this for the rest of the week.

P.S. Joe’s feet had several blisters on them, because he was just wearing an old pair of tennis shoes, he didn’t have hiking boots. My feet were just a little sore, because I had just gotten a nice new pair of hiking boots. Our legs were a little sore the next day, but we were not sore for the whole week. We had a great time. We are looking forward to going hiking again.