Spray Cliffs

What it is

A spray cliff is the face of wet rock beside a waterfall, nearly vertical, with ledges and cracks holding a skin of saturated soil. The national vegetation classification describes it as humid all year and mild in temperature, rarely frozen and rarely scoured by floods, with half to three-quarters of the surface sometimes bare. No one plant dominates. The cover is mostly mosses and liverworts, sphagnum among them, with small ferns and a few flowering plants such as Saxifraga careyana and Carex biltmoreana, and with Rhododendron maximum and Kalmia latifolia present at low cover. The classification ranks it G2 and finds it richest in the escarpment gorges of three North Carolina counties, Transylvania, Jackson and Macon, and of Oconee and Pickens across the South Carolina line, thinning out to the south and west.

Why here

The escarpment supplies both the falls and the water. The rivers that cut south through it toward the Atlantic, the Chattooga, Whitewater, Thompson, Horsepasture and Toxaway, fall steeply through their gorges, the Horsepasture some 1,700 feet in about four miles, and the stations on the high ground above record the heaviest rain in North Carolina. Highlands averages about 88 inches a year. The station at Lake Toxaway, which the State Climate Office calls the state’s perennial wettest site, recorded 137.37 inches in 2003. When Charles Zartman and Dan Pittillo classified the spray cliffs of the Chattooga basin in 1998, they found nine distinct associations, sorted by how much sun a face receives and how often the river floods it, and they found the cliffs behaving like islands, the number of species rising with the size of the rock.

Tropical relations

The ferns are the strangest part. The vegetation classification lists filmy ferns of the genera Trichomanes and Hymenophyllum, the shoestring fern Vittaria appalachiana and the dwarf polypody Grammitis nimbata, and notes that many of the cliffs’ ferns and mosses are disjunct from the tropics, with others endemic or separated from boreal relatives. South Carolina’s natural resources department says several Jocassee ferns and mosses are otherwise known only from tropical Central America.