Lake Jocassee, SC

Daniel and I went kayak camping on Lake Jocassee a few weekends ago. We started our journey off at Devils Fork State Park.

We paddled about 10 minutes and then noticed a bunch of clouds and rain coming in over the mountains to our left. We immediately picked up the pace and headed for the closest section of shore we could find.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAWe found ourselves a small beach cove named “Happy Cove”. We puled our boats up on shore and hid under a bank while the rain passed.

After the rain passed, we jumped in our boats and began paddling again.

After 6 miles of paddling, we came across a small waterfall. When we heard the noise of the falls, we thought we had arrived at Laurel Fork, but once seeing the falls, knew we had a bit further to go.

We paddling a little bit further and caught our first glimpse of Laurel Fork.

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We parked our boats at the bottom and climbed up the rocks to check out the falls. We had to cross a bit of mud, but we made it across. There was a lot of water flowing over the falls due to the recent rain.

We decided it was so difficult to try and carry our bags up the rock face to the campsite on the map so we back paddled a few minutes to the Laurel Fork Boat Ramp. We packed our stuff into our bags and hiked the .5 miles to the campsite. We stopped and checked out a few campsites, but we finally found the perfect spot – at the very top of Laurel Fork Falls.

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The next morning we started our morning out with a filling breakfast of eggs and bacon.

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We then hiked to Virginia Hawkins Falls. It is a pretty waterfall about 2 miles from our campsite.

After visiting Virginia Hawkins, we grabbed our stuff from our campsite and headed back to our boats. We packed our stuff up and checked out the falls once more.

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