Hiking to El Lieutenant

Sherri, Daina, Carley, Anna and I

May 2, 2020

Today is the day. State parks open today and boy are they busy! We decided to do a very lightly traveled trail in a very busy place. Cesars Head State park. Unfortunately this lesser traveled trail is off a very popular parking area. Rainbow Falls Parking lot.

We met Daina and her friends there at 10. They got there first and got a parking spot. when we got there there were none. The sheriff office was helping with rows control and they had this parking area blocked off because it was full. Over flow down the road was full also. He let us wait for a space. There was a car with 2 girls unit who weren’t leaving. I asked him to check with them. They ended up leaving and we got a parking space!

The trail we were taking is the Bill Kimball trail to the left side of the parking lot. We are doing a loop. This is one of the more difficult trails at Cesars head. It goes down into a gorge but first passes El Lieutenant. It’s called that because it looks like a mini version of El Capitain.

The trail is about 2 miles. Part of it is quite a scramble. It is not a well maintained trail.

The views of this sheer rock face were pretty awesome.

The trail continued to the bottom. The bottom meandered through big ferns along the creek. It was beautiful.

We sat down at the intersection of Bill Kimbrell and Coldspring Branch snd had lunch. From here you could continue to Jones Gap. We took the trail back up towards the parking lot. It was a steady incline that followed the creek. The girls got a couple of creek crossings. They got wet on one. Except Anna she rock hopped successfully.

The end got to a pretty steep incline. Then we arrived back at the parking lot. 6.2 miles. I really didn’t take many pictures this trip but it was a really great hike.