DuPont State Recreational Forest

The heart of DuPont is the run of waterfalls on the Little River. Hooker Falls is the gentle one, a wide twelve-foot curtain that drops into a swimming hole below a short, level path, the easiest of the group to reach. Upstream the river turns dramatic. Triple Falls tumbles down three connected ledges for roughly a hundred and twenty feet, so you can take in all three tiers at once from the trail, and just above it High Falls plunges in a single long slide of about the same height, the tallest fall on the river.

A little apart, on Grassy Creek, Bridal Veil Falls spreads into a thin, wide sheet across a slanting granite face that you can actually walk out onto and behind when the water is low. Because the four falls sit within a few miles of each other, and three of them share the same cluster of access areas, DuPont lets you see more real waterfall in a single easy day than almost anywhere in the Southeast.

The forest gets its name from the DuPont company, which built an X-ray film plant on this land and, in the mid-1990s, sold thousands of surrounding acres to the State of North Carolina in a bargain sale arranged through a conservation group. That first purchase created the state forest, but it deliberately left out one prize: the twenty-two-hundred-acre tract that held Triple Falls, High Falls, and Bridal Veil Falls.

That waterfall tract passed to a developer who first promised to leave it alone, then filed plans for a large gated residential community right around the falls. Negotiations failed, and in October of 2000 Governor Jim Hunt and the state's Council of State took the rare step of invoking eminent domain to seize the land for the public. After the courts settled the price, volunteers put in three weeks of frantic trail work, and just before Christmas of 2000 the three great falls opened to everyone for the first time. It is the reason DuPont can call itself a recreational forest and not a subdivision.

DuPont's waterfalls are famous beyond hiking circles, because filmmakers keep coming back to them. The Little River, its falls, and the surrounding woods stood in for the deep colonial frontier in the 1992 film The Last of the Mohicans, and the characters' trek across the Triple Falls ledges and the shelter scene at Bridal Veil Falls were both shot here, though the cave behind the falls was a studio invention.

Two decades later the forest returned to the screen in The Hunger Games, filmed across western North Carolina. One of the movie's best-known moments, when Katniss finds the wounded Peeta hidden among the rocks, was staged at the base of Triple Falls. Standing on the same ledges, with the water roaring past, is part of the fun for a lot of visitors, but the scenery holds up perfectly well without a movie. The falls looked like this long before the cameras arrived.

DuPont lies in the mountains between Brevard and Hendersonville, and most visitors start at the High Falls or Hooker Falls access areas off Staton Road, where parking and restrooms make it easy to reach the three big Little River falls on foot. From there a loop of well-marked trails links Hooker, Triple, and High Falls, so many people see all three in a single half-day walk, with Bridal Veil Falls a bit farther on for those with more time.

Beyond the waterfalls, the forest opens up into granite domes with wide views, quiet lakes, and more than eighty miles of trails that hikers, mountain bikers, and horseback riders all share on old gravel roads. Wear real shoes, stay behind the railings and off the slick rock, and give the popular falls trails an early start on a summer weekend. It is public land at its best, big, generous, and full of moving water, kept open by the people who fought to save it.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.