Tag Archives: Foothills Trail

Hiking South Carolina’s Foothills Trail – A review

FrontOnlyFoothillsIt’s fashionable to believe that hiking guides are no longer necessary because everyone has a cell phone, an app, and the web. However, nothing can beat a book or map in your pack.

Maybe hiking guides no longer have to sell you on the hike. No need to wax poetic about the beauty of the waterfall or the view. We can leave this to the web. And it’s not a bad place to get hiking ideas.

But when it comes to the actual turn-by-turn directions and how to find the trailhead, we all need the accuracy of a guidebook. So it is with the Foothills Trail (FHT).

The FHT is a 76.2-mile national recreation trail from Table Rock State Park to Oconee State Park in upstate South Carolina. In between, it crosses into Western North Carolina. The trail features waterfalls, lakes, rivers, and Sassafras Mountain, the highest mountain in South Carolina. So how long would it take you to walk the distance?

For that, you need to pick up Hiking South Carolina’s Foothills Trail by Scott Lynch. The book shows you that you could do it in five days, averaging 15.3 miles, or six days (12.7 miles per day) or seven days, (10.8 miles a day). All of this is figured out for you. Lynch tells you where to start and end and where to camp in between. In addition, the author highlights the crown jewel section in the middle. Concise directions are given from either direction.

But what if you don’t want to backpack? No problem. The guide offers clear directions to major and minor trailheads, so you can plan a dayhike.

Top of Sassafras Mt.
Top of Sassafras Mt.

Yesterday, I led a Carolina Mountain Club hike on the FHT to Sassafras Mountain and back. Usually, I photocopy the pages I need but this pocket guide is the perfect size to put in your pack or even your pocket.

Scott Lynch is a former outdoor guide who’s written other books on the area. With a guidebook, it’s also important to look at the publisher, Milestone Press.

They’ve been publishing outdoor guides for over twenty years. Their books are well done, clear, and most important to me, they’re accurate at the time of publication.

It might seem like a lot of money on a per page basis. But you’re paying for a book that’s also an annotated map. Therefore, you get a map and book, together. Quite a good deal.

The Details
Hiking South Carolina’s Foothills Trail, Paperback by Scott Lynch
72 pages, $16.95 Publisher: Milestone Press, 2015 ISBN-13: 978-1889596303

Hiking the Foothills Trail

Foothills Trail
Foothills Trail

Sometimes you have to leave North Carolina for quality hiking, especially in the winter.

Yesterday, I went on a hike with Carolina Mountain Club to the Foothills Trail in South Carolina. The 77-mile trail lies southeast from Table Rock State Park to Oconee State Park. As its name implies, the trail follows the base of the Southern Appalachian mountains but it’s not flat.

We started at the Laurel Falls Access on a windy dirt road four miles from SC 178 and walked about 5.5 miles to Lake Jocassee and then back. It was a warm, gray day as the trail went up and down, up and down. Lots of high-quality wood steps made the climbs easier.

Virginia Hawkins Falls
Virginia Hawkins Falls

The Foothills Trail Conference (FTC), the nonprofit that promotes and supports the trail, does a wonderful job of maintaining the trail. Though we had to negotiate some blowdowns, I could tell the trail is well-maintained during the main hiking season.

The unifying feature of our section is water. We crossed and crisscrossed Laurel Fork Creek many times on sturdy bridges. Someone counted 20 bridges in just 5.5 miles. I didn’t verify this.

We had our mid-morning snack at Virginia Hawkins Falls, a wide falls with several smaller cascades to follow. The falls were named in 2004 for Virginia Hawkins, the long-serving executive secretary of the Foothills Trail Conference. Just the fact that FTC could name a waterfall for one of their employees and so recently as well tells you that this land is private. It’s owned by Duke Power Energy which harnessed the water for power generation.

Lake Jocassee
Lake Jocassee

The state with Duke Power also built Lake Jocassee, though it’s difficult to know without more research if Duke is still using the site for power. We had lunch on the edge of the lake and stared at Laurel Fork Falls on the opposite side.  Can you see the falls on the back left edge?

We walked back – up and down – and beat the rain to our cars.