Crooked Arm Cascade

Crooked Arm Cascade is a cascade style waterfall in the Cades Cove area of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  This particular waterfall took me longer to find than I would have liked, due to not understanding where the trailhead was.  When you enter the Cades Cove section of the national park you find yourself coming to an information kiosk with a lot of parking at the side of road, which serves as the starting point for the Cades Coves Loop Rd, a one way driving tour that bunches of tourists take to visit several misc sites in that part of the park.  Here’s the catch, because this is a tourist hot spot and everything is about driving super slow or even stopping to look at stuff by the road, that once you find yourself on this loop road, you’re trapped.  Being a one way, that means if you miss whatever you’re trying to find, you’re also out of luck.  I accidentally bypassed the trailhead for Crooked Arm Cascade and had to return hours later because I was already sucked into the rest of the loop.

So where is the trail head?  The trailhead for Crooked Arm cascade is the Rich Mountain Loop’s trailhead.  The parking for that trailhead is the kiosk area just BEFORE you start the one way loop.  So you don’t have to get trapped on the driving tour to visit this.  All YOU need to do is park in the lot at the kiosk, and start walking down the road into the loop.   It starts with a cow pasture on the left, and off to the right, still in view and pretty close to the kiosk area, you’ll find the Rich Mountain Loop Trail sign.  The sign will tell you that the Crooked Arm Ridge Trail is 0.5 miles up it.  Follow this trail, and when you intersect the Crooked Arm Ridge trail, take a right.  You’ll only be a few minutes away from finding the Crooked Arm Cascade.  It was not flowing much when I was there, and the trick was figuring out where to scramble down from the trail to the base.

I’ve seen information suggesting the drop there is about 25 feet, and the rest of it just cascades over the shelf zones.  While not the most spectacular of falls, it was still worth visiting and not a huge time suck.  Being that this is in the national park there were a lot of bear activities signs posted in this area, so take an air horn or something with you just in case you need to scare one off.  I’d seen my first bear of the day in this same section of park a few hours previously at Abrams Falls, so paranoia was high by the time I hit the Crooked Arm Cascade.