After a 2 month break from the Foothills Trail, we were more than ready to pick up where we had left off and finish the hike. Other weekend obligations had caused us to wait until May to finish the hike, and the long Memorial Day weekend gave us the perfect opportunity to take our time and enjoy the trail instead of pushing ourselves just to get it done. We decided to skip a short section of the trail between the Bad Creek access and Upper WW Falls. This is a very strenuous section, and since we weren't through hiking, we didn't feel too bad about missing this section. We'll be back someday to through hike the trail, and we'll get that section.. till then, we're not losing sleep over it.

We started at the Upper Whitewater Falls parking lot at about 10:30 am. The sky was clear and the air was cool... a perfect day to be off from work and out on the trail. We had hiked about 30 minutes, climbing up Grassy Knob mountain. when we rounded a corner and found a 2 foot, dark brown snake across the trail. We both jumped back and tried to figure a way around it.. assuming it was a poisonous copperhead. but it turned out to be a simple Northern Water Snake.

We continued on across Round Mountain and the Chatooga Ridge, and enjoyed the great views to the south of the piedmont and Lake Jocassee. The views would have been much better in the winter time, but still were very rewarding in spots.

We reached the Sloan Bridge picnic area at about 1:30 and took a brief rest, and a few pictures. We had driven past this spot a couple times on our way to other trails and were familiar with the Foothills Trail at this point. We decided to push on for a couple more miles, since we were trying to average between 7 and 8 miles a day. That would put us somewhere between here and the access road to the Walhalla Fish Hatchery.

We found a decent little campsite off the side of the trail, somewhere around mile 7. The exact spot of the campsite is hard to describe since there aren't any distinguishing features nearby. The easiest way to describe it is, that it is about 1/2 mile past the powerlines that service the fish hatchery and near an old, abandoned roadbed. There aren't many decent campsites in this area.. in fact we didn't see any from where we camped until we reached Burrell's Ford the following morning.

The rain started at about the time we climbed into the tent and continued through the night. We had a rather easy day of hiking and went to sleep hoping for the same tomorrow!