Why a Ten-Time CrossFit Champion Keeps Coming Back to a Gadsden Waterfall

On the first Saturday in October, four-person teams gather in the gravel lot outside the wedding chapel at Noccalula Falls Campground, check in, and within the first quarter mile leave the paved path that every other park visitor walks. They disappear into trail most people who have been coming to this park for years have never set foot on.

This is Legends of the Falls, the outdoor endurance race built by Rich Froning, a ten-time CrossFit Games champion, and it returns to Noccalula Falls Park on October 3, 2026. Coverage and event footage going back to 2020 show it has run here every year since, which makes it one of the longer-standing annual sporting events tied to a single Gadsden landmark. The teams are mixed gender, four athletes each, all eighteen or older, and they cover four miles broken up by seven stations built to test strength and endurance along the way. The race benefits Mayhem Mission, the nonprofit Froning and a group of friends started in 2020 to support communities hit by poverty, crisis, and natural disaster through direct giving and volunteer work.

None of that is the interesting part. The interesting part is where the race actually goes.

The Path Everyone Already Knows

If you have brought out-of-town guests to Noccalula Falls, you have almost certainly walked the Black Creek Trail. It starts beside the wedding chapel, runs 1.7 miles of crushed gravel down along the gorge to a viewing deck with picnic tables, then continues to flatten out near the Etowah County Rescue Squad building at the bottom. The first stretch down is a gentle downhill, which means the walk back up is the part everyone remembers. It is wide, well marked, and graded easy enough that the park's own materials call it suitable for every skill level.

For most people, that 1.7 miles is Noccalula Falls. See the 90-foot drop into Black Creek Gorge, walk the gravel path, maybe catch the train ride or the mini golf course, and go home.

The Trail Network the Park's Own Page Undersells

Here is the gap. The park's official trail page, the one most residents would find if they searched for hiking near the falls, names five trails in total: the Black Creek Trail itself, plus Whatley Trail at one mile of moderate rocky terrain, Moonshine Ridge at seven-tenths of a mile with rolling elevation, Cascade Trail at six-tenths of a mile with barely any climbing, and Family Loop at six-tenths of a mile built for beginners. Add it up and that official description covers roughly 4.6 miles of trail across five named routes.

Trailforks, the mapping database mountain bikers and trail runners actually use to plan rides, counts 24 separate trails in the same footprint, spanning roughly 13 miles, with 23 of them built for mountain biking. That is nearly triple the mileage the park's own visitor-facing copy accounts for, and most of the difference is trail the tourism page never names at all: Witches Brew, which climbs 172 feet at an average grade near five percent and carries the steepest sustained climb in the system, Dog Hill, which drops 250 feet on the way down, and G-Force, a downhill-only blue trail built purely for speed rather than casual walking.

Trail systems get built out gradually, one volunteer weekend and one grant at a time, and the copy describing them rarely keeps pace. That is a normal lag almost anywhere. What is less normal is that the gap got wide enough for a national-level athlete to notice, and to keep coming back.

Where the Race Actually Runs

Legends of the Falls does not touch the gravel path most visitors walk. Organizers describe the four-mile course as running through the park's tougher terrain, the same singletrack the tourism page barely mentions, and that routing choice is the whole story here. A race built to test serious athletes has to use trail that can actually hold up to that test. Every year Froning's team picks this course, they are confirming, in public, that the harder trails at Noccalula Falls are real and rideable at a competitive level, not a rumor passed around by a handful of local mountain bikers.

It is not only outside talent showing up either. Local gyms have folded themselves into the operation for years. CrossFit Thelo, one of the area's affiliated gyms, has sponsored the Wall Balls station at the race in past seasons, the kind of hands-on involvement that turns a visiting event into something the local fitness community actually runs alongside.

What This Means the Other Fifty-One Weeks

If you have only ever walked the gravel trail down to the falls, you have seen maybe an eighth of what is actually out there. The trails Legends of the Falls uses are open to the public year-round for hiking, trail running, and mountain biking, entered from the same Noccalula Falls Campground parking lot beside the wedding chapel. Whatley Trail is the closest thing to a warm-up version of what the race covers, moderate and rocky without the full technical demand. Moonshine Ridge is the one locals describe as genuinely fun rather than punishing. G-Force runs downhill only, so anyone riding it should keep their head up for other traffic coming the opposite direction on the connecting trails, since most of the network outside G-Force runs both ways.

The falls themselves shift with the seasons in a way the trails do not. Black Creek is the only thing feeding the waterfall, no dam, no reservoir, so heavy winter and spring rain can push it toward flood while late summer and fall often bring it down to a trickle. October's race lands right in that lower-water stretch, which means the day the trail system gets its biggest test of the year is also, most years, the day the waterfall itself is at its quietest.

The rest of the calendar at the park tells its own story. The Spring Lantern Festival lit the park most Friday through Sunday evenings from mid-February through early April this year. Smoke on the Falls, the barbecue competition, took over the campground in April. The 127 Yard Sale, the multi-state stretch of roadside sales that starts at Noccalula Falls and runs six hundred miles north, passed through the first weekend of August. Each of those turns the park into something different for a weekend. Legends of the Falls is the one day the trail system itself, not the waterfall or the lanterns or the yard sale tables, is the reason people show up.

If You Want to See It This Year

Registration and team formation happen through the event's own site, and the four-person, mixed-gender team format means this is built for groups who train together, not solo entries. Spectating does not require any special access since the falls and grounds are open to the public during regular park hours, and the trailhead by the wedding chapel is the same access point locals use every other week of the year.

If you would rather test the terrain yourself before or after race day, start with Whatley or Moonshine Ridge and work up from there. Either one will tell you more about what this park actually is than the walk to the viewing deck ever will.

Noccalula Falls has been the postcard shot of Gadsden for generations. What is easy to miss, unless you follow where a ten-time champion chooses to send his athletes every October, is how much trail sits behind that postcard, and how long it took even the park's own description to catch up.

If trails like these are part of why Gadsden feels like home to you, or you are curious what it takes to live closer to Noccalula Falls and the rest of this side of town, Rachel Hicks knows this area well and is always glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.