Stillhouse Hollow Falls

by bill - 2023-12-09 13:02:09 ( in life, travel, usa, southeast) [php version] rebuild

I stopped here a couple weeks ago, on a whim, on one of my regular Sunday drives. There's a little sign, easy to miss, as you drive by on the highway between Columbia and whatever the next decent-sized town west of there is. Recalling names has always been one of my weaknesses. Introduce yourself to me and I'll almost immediately forget it unless I can associate it with something else. If your name is Cliff, I can associate it with cliff diving or jumping off a cliff. Not that I've done either one of those, but I can make the association.

The place is called Stillhouse Hollow Falls, linked at the bottom of this page. There's a short gravel road leading uphill from the highway to a little gravel parking lot. I guess that road is called a "driveway." There were four or five cars already there, but no one around, at least no one visible, when I pulled in. The rough, narrow trail leads steeply down almost immediately. Halfway down, I came upon a girl -- sorry, young woman -- sorry, person who probably identifies as a woman, given her long blonde hair, pretty face and various curves. She was sitting at the base of a tree, fiddling with her phone, and had turned to look when she heard me hiking loudly down the trail.

Here are the first few video clips: falls1 -- falls2 -- falls3

I wanted her to know I was friendly. Assuage her fears. If I was a young woman alone in the woods, and a man as strange as me came toward me, I'd be apprehensive. So, I said hello in a sing-song sort of voice as I passed, but kept on walking. I probably overdid the sing-songiness. She probably thought I was a complete weirdo. She'd be right, but she said, "Hey, there," real friendly-like.

Crisis averted, I continued down the trail, looking for these falls. At the fork in the trail, I took the wrong one, going left and uphill instead of right, along the creek. That'd be the purple dashed line instead of the red one on this map. I got to a certain point up there before realizing there was no scenic overlook in my immediate future, so I turned around and went back down to the creek.

When I got to this point, here, I thought "Please tell me this isn't it." It wasn't.

Here it is from the top of the falls. And, finally, the falls themselves..."

here. Apparently, I never got a good video of the actual falls, I'm such a bad vidographer.

For more bad videos, go here!

Go here for the official Stillhouse Hollow Falls website.