Moonshine Falls at Asbury Hills

I’ve decided to start logging my hikes in this blog because I do get asked what hikes I’ve taken and which ones I’d recommend for troops.  I hope that’s OK with all four or five of you reading this blog.  😉

Back in March of 2014, my friend Meggan and I drove up to Asbury Hills, a United Methodist youth camp near Cleveland, SC, to hike to Moonshine Falls as recommended by our Methodist minister.  You can download a map on the Asbury Hills website.  It’s called Moonshine Falls because it used to be the site of an actual moonshine still way back when.  And the 55 gallon drums are still there!   I’m guessing Asbury Hills wasn’t there at the time.  At least I hope not.  You know those crazy Methodists, though! 

If you hike anywhere at Asbury Hills, make sure you call ahead to get permission.  Most likely it won’t be open for hiking while camps are in session.  We went on a Saturday in March.

You can find better trail descriptions through Google searches.  But, it is 5.2 miles round trip and is considered moderate but long by a few ratings.  I would say that’s pretty accurate.  Although Meggan and I made it a lot longer than it should of been.  Foreshadowing!

Even though we went at the end of March before spring broke out, this was still a very pretty hike.

Before you get to the creek crossing, there’s a separate Boy Scout and Girl Scout marked area that I’m assuming is for backpacking.  I plan on finding out more information about it at a later time and might use it as one of our future troop backpacking endeavors.  Yeah, I’m serious about this backpacking thing!

Right after this area, you get to the cable bridge crossing.  I would definitely wait and bring older girls on this hike as I can see younger girls getting scared trying to cross.  It’s very stable and strong, so I wasn’t worried about it breaking by any means, but it does getting some used to if you’re not familiar with cable crossings.

Continuing on, we came upon lots and lots and lots of larger rocks.  I had seen the movie Frozen at this point about eleventy billion times at this point due to the fact that I have two young girls, so I thought maybe the rocks would all of a sudden turn over and become trolls.  Maybe they’d even start singing “Fixer Upper.”

There are two rock piles listed on the map, and here’s Meggan and I at the first one so that you can see what they look like.  We were unsure how large they were going to be, but as you can see, it’s pretty obvious when you come up on them.