Black Friday Waterfall Wandering
Asbury Hills
Cleveland, SC
Friday, November 29th, 2013
While most people like to hit the Shopping Malls on Black Friday, my waterfall wandering buddies decided to hit the woods to hopefully find some undocumented waterfalls!
The core waterfall team of Andy, Darrin, Brenda, and myself were joined by bushwhacking newbies Nina and Sherron to explore an area of the Ashbury Hills Camp in Cleveland, SC where Darrin heard there might be some waterfalls to be found.
Our area of exploration would be two small tributary streams with no trail access. We had hoped the heavy rains earlier in the week would mean enough waterflow to make this adventure worthwhile.
The waterfall wandering gang!
As far as bushwhacking goes, this was fairly easy making for a good introduction to bushwhacking for Nina and Sherron.
Bushwhacking
We found nothing worthwhile on the first stream we explored. Just a long series of slides with no significant drops of more than a few feet. So we called a pivot and headed to the next stream to the West.
We hit the waterfall jackpot finding a nice 60-70 footer!
The new unnamed waterfall we found
The new unnamed waterfall we found
While it took us about 3.5 hours of bushwhacking to get here, we found a much easier route back to our vehicles. However, I believe the return route might have taken us across private property.
The much quicker return route left us enough time to seek out one more waterfall. Secret Falls is listed on the Asbury Hills Trail map, and since none of us had ever been we decided to do what look like about a 2-mile round trip hike.
The old forest road trails we expected to be hiking eventually fizzled out so we ended up doing a bit more bushwhacking. Without too much effort we were back on track and eventually found the less than spectacular Secret Falls!
Me at Secret Falls
While the cloudless sky did not make for a spectacular day of photography, it did make for a great day to be outside! I thoroughly enjoyed this day of waterfall wandering! A much better way to spend Black Friday than inside a crowded Shopping Mall!
The complete set of photos is posted here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/8146392@N05/sets/72157638215922746/
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