Agile Trekker: Foothills Trail Day 2 - Simms Field Campsite to Fish Hatchery Campsite

Date	Distance	Time	Elevation Gain	Average Moving Time	Year to Date Miles
5/9/2022	15.3 miles	8 hours 13 minutes	2,131'	2.4	340.9

Parking:

One car at Oconee State Park
One car at Bad Creek Access Area
One car at Table Rock State Park

Maps:

Trail map, pocket profile, guidebook from Products – Foothills Trail Conservancy
FarOut app, Foothills Trail

Directions:

Backpack from Simms Field Campsite to Fish Hatchery Campsite

Day 2 of our hike. I didn't study the bear bag hanging situation well enough before the hike. The Simms Field Campsite required us to hang our food. I brought stuff to hang a bear bag, instead of an Ursack. I haven't practiced bear bag hanging in a long time. Unfortunately, there really weren't good trees for hanging a bear bag. Most trees went straight up, with no side branches. We found a bent tree and used it. Not ideal. Luckily our food was still there in the morning. The recently released Foothills guide on the FarOut app actually has icons to show which sites have bear cables. Sites that don't have cables just don't have the icon. If I did this trail again, I'd bring my Ursack instead. I didn't see anyone using them, but it would have been so much easier! On later days, we did stay at sites with a cable. Although the cables were easy to use, they weren't ideal either. There was a cable between 2 trees, and a single cable hanging off of it for everyone to hook their food onto. The problem was, as more and more people hooked up their food bags, the cable hanging down got lower and lower, to the point where you might be able to reach up and touch the bags standing below them. That means a bear could too. We didn't see any bears on the trip, though we met one guy who had seen one.

One great thing about this trail: WILDFLOWERS

This hike has a large variety of wildflowers. I didn't look them all up to figure out what they were. Mountain laurel were blooming throughout the trail. At the end of the hike, we saw our first rhododendrons in bloom. My favorites flowers were the many pink lady slippers, and some spikey bent white flowers.