The plan for Day 2 was to hike for 7 to 8 miles and find a good campsite along the Chatooga river somewhere south of Burrell's Ford. That would leave us about 15 miles to complete the hike, and would make for an easy last 2 days. When we got up, the rain stopped.. almost as if someone saw us get up and turned it off. Besides the wet tent, we couldn't have asked for better hiking conditions for the day. We got up and on the trail early this morning... we started hiking by 8:30, which was plenty early considering we only had about 3-4 hours of hiking to do. We knew that we had a short climb before reaching the access road to the fish hatchery, but in the cool morning air, we hardly even noticed the slight elevation change.

It didn't take long at all to reach the road, and we decided to take a brief rest and try to reach our "ride" via cell phone. We didn't have much luck getting a signal here, nor anywhere else in the Chatooga River Gorge, but we wanted to give our ride plenty of warning of our ETA at Oconee State park.

While we waited, a beat-up pickup truck pulled up next to us and asked if we had seen a guy hiking the trail this morning. We hadn't passed anyone at all, so we weren't much help. The 2 guys in the truck said something that sounded like their friend had "gotten mad at them and started walking on the trail and they couldn't find him." We told them that we would keep an eye out for him and turn him back toward their campsite at Burrell's Ford, if we saw him. But secretly we hoped that we would not see a strange, deranged, mad man alone in the woods. We never did.. thank God.

We arrived at the Burrell's Ford parking lot around 11:30 and we were both more than ready for lunch. The parking lot was overflowing with cars...  we assumed they were all people camping at the campground over the memorial Day weekend, and hoped they were not hikers on the Foothills Trail. I think we were mostly correct on that guess.

We had about 2 miles to go in the afternoon... we had made great time in the morning, hiking 5.5 miles before lunch. We had picked out a specific campsite that the Guidebook mentioned, since you never know just where you might or might not  find a place to setup camp. Since we would get there pretty early in the day, the chance was good we would have the campsite for ourselves.

The hike down along the Chatooga was surprisingly difficult, not due to elevation change, but more to the trail conditions, such as rocks, roots, mud, fallen trees and overhanging limbs. We made our campsite by 2:00 in the afternoon and wanted to spend some time swimming in the river, but as soon as our feet hit the water, we realized it was much to cold to go swimming.

We spent some time setting up the tent and hanging out the wet clothes, tarp, rainfly and anything else that had gotten rained on the previous night. The sun was shining off the river, and warming everything around us, making us sleepy. 2 other seperate young couples passed through our campsite, noting that we had found a great camp site and hoped that they could find one just like it. I guess a little planning goes a long way in getting the right campsite.

We went to bed, listening to the sounds of the river and again feeling pretty good after an easy day of hiking. We had about 14.5 miles left and plans to finish that over the next 2 days.