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Little Brasstown Falls, a 40-foot-high granite beauty, is one of dozens of waterfalls tucked into the mountains of South Carolina’s Oconee County.
Photo by Mic Smith
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Thomas King, author of Waterfall Hikes of Upstate South Carolina, stands in front of Ramsey Creek Falls in Chau Ram County Park.
Photo by Mic Smith
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Dewit Anderson, from Greenville, N.C., takes a photo of his girlfriend, Shakira Morgan, at Yellow Branch Falls.
Photo by Mic Smith
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Bull Sluice is a Class V rapid on the Chattooga River, known for whitewater rafting and its nearby swimming hole.
Photo by Mic Smith.
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Joe Carter, a Blue Ridge Electric Cooperative member from Mountain Rest, S.C., cools off at Bull Sluice.
Photo by Mic Smith
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Writer Susan Hill Smith enjoys Riley Moore Falls.
Photo by Mic Smith
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The powerful, 70-foot-high King Creek Falls is an immersive experience well worth the relatively short but muddy hike.
Photo by Mic Smith
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Whitewater Falls is the highest series of falls in eastern North America, with a total drop of more than 800 feet from Upper Whitewater Falls in North Carolina to the end of Lower Whitewater Falls in South Carolina (pictured here) as it spills into Oconee County.
Photo by Mic Smith
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Station Cove Falls is accessible with just a half-mile hike into Sumter National Forest.
Photo by Mic Smith
A sensory treat awaits near the base of the 40-foot-high falls that end Little Brasstown Creek. As my husband takes photographs, I watch the water race over the granite ledges with a splashing roar and feel the coolness of the spray in the air. If not for the snake sunning itself on the rocks by the water, we might have waded into the calm pool at the bottom, where families play on warm days.
We had set out that morning from the Brasstown Valley trailhead in Sumter National Forest, expecting to visit four impressive waterfalls with less than a mile of hiking. At the outset, it seemed too easy. But now, we find ourselves looping over to another trail that runs beside the bigger Brasstown Creek and features a quick succession of three more falls, each shaped by gravity and water in a unique way. We follow the path to a tiered cascade, move on to a veiled falls and finish with a sluice, where water squeezes downward through a narrow passageway as it drops 35 feet into a swimmable pool.
We take a short climb down a wooden ladder that drops us by the rushing waters of the sluice. Otherwise, the hike isn’t demanding or time consuming. Even as we stop to chat with visitors from Texas, Florida and Indiana, we’re back at the trailhead within about two hours on this sunny Friday afternoon in September.
Our weekend of chasing waterfalls in Oconee County is off to a fast start.
Sharing an abundant resource
South Carolina’s Upstate and neighboring sections of Georgia and North Carolina boast an intense concentration of waterfalls. The two main reasons are the region’s average annual rainfall of 80 inches and the dramatic rise in the Blue Ridge Mountains known as the Blue Ridge Escarpment—or the “Blue Wall,” as the Cherokee called it.
Not surprisingly, Oconee County’s Cherokee-derived name has been translated as “watery eyes of the hills.” In the third edition of his guide, Waterfall Hikes of Upstate South Carolina, local author and outdoors advocate Thomas King lists a whopping 65 waterfalls in Oconee County, along with 33 waterfalls in Pickens County and 46 in Greenville County. At least 36 more falls in those Upstate counties didn’t make it in the guide because of accessibility issues. (King’s website, waterfallwalker.com, is another excellent source of waterfall information, with photos, videos and additional resources.)
For each waterfall in his guide, King provides two pages of details, helping set expectations with a five-tiered rating system from “nice” to “spectacular,” difficulty levels from “easy” to “strenuous,” and the length and estimated time for the hikes.
On Friday evening at Chau Ram County Park, we meet up with King and his wife, Fay, who took notes for the guide as she accompanied him on many of the hikes. In addition to a notable suspension bridge, the county park features Ramsey Creek Falls, which has adjacent parking and picnic tables. You can drive up to the 40-foot-high tiered waterfall and, if you land the right parking spot, walk a few steps to a small stone table with a nice view of the falls.
Accessibility and amenities are key to this waterfall’s popularity; otherwise, it gets a “good” rating in King’s book. While he lives an hour’s drive away in Williamston, he visits this spot with members of his church for picnics. For him, sharing waterfalls with others is as meaningful as experiencing them himself, and he gets choked up as he recalls sharing a meal under a nearby shed with friends who have since passed away.
“Excuse me,” says the 80-year-old King. “These are just memories.”
The beauty and the danger
The Kings started exploring waterfalls together when they dated in their 20s. “We hiked down the side of Whitewater Falls when there was no trail,” Fay says, and I know enough to understand this took determination and courage.
Located along the North Carolina–South Carolina border, Whitewater Falls is the highest series of falls in eastern North America, with a total drop of more than 800 feet from Upper Whitewater Falls in North Carolina to the end of Lower Whitewater Falls in South Carolina as it spills into Oconee County.
King tells me about a harrowing moment he had exploring Upper Whitewater Falls as a teenager with three hiking buddies: “One of my friends walked out on the waterfall, slipped and fell over a certain area of the falls, landed in the pool and crashed up against some rocks that kept him from going over the final plunge.”
King and the others retrieved him from the water and helped him limp back with a broken heel, and they kept the episode quiet. “We didn’t call the rescue squad,” he says. “No newspaper picked up that story.”
Today, Whitewater Falls is one of the most visited and photographed waterfalls in the Blue Ridge Mountains. And while most see the series from viewing platforms, at least 13 people who got too close have died at Upper Whitewater Falls since 1995, according to news reports published in 2022 when a toddler slipped into the water and went over the falls.
Other waterfalls in the region, including Little Brasstown Falls, have memorial markers for hikers who lost their lives there. In his book, which he compiled after retiring, King advises hikers to “always exercise extra caution and common sense around all waterfalls.” The rocks, roots and fallen trees around them are typically wet and slippery, and even a twist of the ankle can ruin a hike, he reminds. Plus, emergency help may take time to arrive in remote areas.
Dialing up the adventure
Within a half day, my husband and I managed to see six waterfalls, including a quick stop at Issaqueena Falls, a relatively easy quest known for its dramatic backstory as much as its beauty.
Legend tells us the waterfall is named for a Choctaw maiden from the mid-1700s. Issaqueena fell in love with an English trader, warned his colony of an impending attack by the Cherokees and escaped the tribe’s wrath by either faking her death or surviving a jump from the 100-foot-high falls. Interpretive signs with more details are at the site, which includes paid parking and a well-maintained short trail that takes visitors to a viewing platform. From there, it’s a rougher but relatively short descent to get close to the bottom of the falls.
On Saturday, we choose waterfall hikes that require more effort and a splash of adventure. Our morning visit to Yellow Branch Falls involves a 2.6-mile round trip on a well-maintained trail through groves of native trees and ferns. For me, it’s a Goldilocks trek, with just enough up-and-down to get my blood pumping, plus the payoff of seeing and hearing thousands of trickles spilling over thin rock ledges at the secluded, 60-foot-high convex falls.
Next, we set off to find the Chauga Narrows using a less-traveled path geared more toward trout anglers. Without King’s guide, we never would have known about this hidden waterfall or how to find it. While the round-trip hike along the Chauga River is only 1.2 miles, it requires ducking through tangles of rhododendron and downed trees. When we reach the 200-foot run of rapids, we have the place to ourselves and enjoy a magical nature moment, sitting on the rocks, gazing at the fine particles suspended in the air above the frothy whoosh of whitewater.
After that, we drive 10 miles to a trail that takes us to Bull Sluice, a complex Class V rapid on the Chattooga River, which forms part of the Georgia-South Carolina border. King’s book tells us that eight people, including kayakers, have lost their lives at Bull Sluice. So I’m surprised to see whitewater rafters taking a break to jump from a boulder into the churning water at the end of the rapids; though, thankfully, they are wearing life vests and supervised by their rafting guides.
‘Air vitamins’
Fast-forward to Sunday afternoon, as we take in our 15th waterfall of the weekend, the 70-foot-high King Creek Falls, an immersive experience well worth the relatively short but muddy hike. I sit on a ridge of stepping stones by the shallow pool below the falls and talk over the water’s hum with Lavonda Mullet, who lives by Lake Keowee in Seneca. She and her spouse used to bring their four kids on waterfall hikes, but now that the kids are older and busier, she’s visiting on her own.
“When I’ve got a lot going on in my head, the best thing for me to do is get by water,” she says. “It’s a place where I can let go of everything and just think through some things. I’ll often take a notebook and do journaling, or a book and just read. I don’t know, life gets chaotic, and sometimes just being in nature gives you perspective.”
While she connects with the water in other ways, including kayaking on Lake Keowee, she prefers waterfalls for her nature fix. “There’s something about a waterfall that’s just extra soothing. I think it’s probably the noise, the negative ions. … I love it.”
She’s not the only one to speculate that negative ions, a byproduct of misting water, can benefit well-being and help explain our attraction to waterfalls, which produce an abundance of these “air vitamins.” That conversation started in the early 1900s with Nobel Prize-winning research and continues to this day. Some reports suggest negative ions can have a calming impact on the brain’s serotonin levels, similar to Prozac. In a 2021 study in China, patients showed a significant decrease in fatigue, anxiety, depression and hopelessness and an increase in antioxidants after spending three hours a day for a week in a waterfall forest environment.
Inspired to return
Personally, I find the closer I can safely get to a waterfall, the more satisfied I am. That’s reinforced during a follow-up visit to Oconee County in late October, which we start by hiking 2 miles to a viewing platform for Lower Whitewater Falls.
We enjoy the vibrant autumn leaves along the way, and once we arrive at the platform, we can see most of the falls’ 200-foot drop—an excellent photographic opportunity for my husband, with optimal fall foliage. But we are miles away from the falls, and for me, it’s not as invigorating as other magical waterfall moments we’ve already enjoyed in Oconee County. From the platform, I’m missing the splashes, the mist and the megadose of air vitamins—not to mention the sound, which I imagine would be thunderous if we were hiking by Whitewater Falls, as the Kings did decades ago.
Thankfully, we finish out our field research over the next two days with treks that allow us to get up close to popular Station Cove Falls, Reedy Branch Falls and the middle and upper sections of Fall Creek Falls—all rated by King as “excellent,” one step below “spectacular.”
In total, we visited 20 waterfalls over two trips to the Upstate, which seems like a lot but is less than a third of the Oconee County listings in King’s guide. We will be back for more, including recommended falls in Greenville and Pickens counties. But instead of rushing, we will try to take more time on each waterfall so we can soak it all in.
Like the snowflake cliche, no two waterfall experiences are the same. The value of each is unique, subjective and can’t fully be categorized. While King has offered a framework in his guide that helps connect others with the wonders of nature, I believe he would agree. When I asked which Upstate waterfalls he liked the most, it was clear he had already given that question some thought because he had an answer ready:
“The one I am at is my favorite.”
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Waterfall safety tips
Adapted from Visit Oconee County
- Stay on developed trails. Don’t stray from observation decks and platforms.
- Follow instructions posted at all waterfalls and trails.
- Watch your footing. Dry rocks can be just as slippery as wet ones, especially those covered with algae.
- The top of any waterfall is the most dangerous. Do not lean over a ledge at the top of a falls.
- Do not swim or wade upstream of a waterfall.
- Children should always be under the immediate, careful supervision of adults when visiting any falls.
- Pets should also be supervised. They can easily underestimate the slickness of rocks and the flow of water.
- Be especially careful when you are taking photographs, and have secure footing.
- Hike with others when you trek to waterfalls so someone “has your back” in the event you run into trouble.
- Bring your cellphone in case you need to make a call for assistance. But realize you may not receive cell service in rural or forested areas.