Description: This two-hour journey is quite an effort for the 50-foot Opossum Creek Falls, but depending on your spirit of adventure, reaching the falls could rank among your most rewarding waterfall excursions, or the most difficult. Most of the two-mile hike ambles along a pleasant, forest service trail shaded by an assortment of hardwoods and bordered at times by small partridgeberry wildflowers. When you reach the Chattooga River, turn left onto a heavily vegetated path and scramble around rocks and trees for a time-consuming half-mile hike to the base of the falls.

Height: 50 feet

Length of hike: 1.5 miles to the Chattooga River. Another 0.5 mile up Opossum Creek

Time to hike: 2 hours

Difficulty: Strenuous

Creek or river: Opossum Creek

USGS Quadrangle: Rainey Mountain

Directions to the falls:

1. From Westminster, drive west on US 76 for 13.3 miles and turn left onto Damascus Church Road (Oconee County S-37-96). Long Creek Fire Station will be on your right after this turn.

2. Drive 0.9 mile and turn right onto Battle Creek Road (Oconee County S-37-102).

3. Drive 1.9 miles and turn right onto Turkey Ridge Road (FS 755, which is gravel).

4. Continue 2.3 miles to FS 755F on the left; park.

5. Walk back up FS 755 to the trail on the right and hike about 1.5 miles to the end of the trail where Opossum Creek enters the Chattooga River.

6. Turn left.

7. Continue upstream on Opossum Creek about 0.5 mile to the base of the waterfall.

Information: Sumter National Forest, Andrew Pickens Ranger District, 112 Andrew Pickens Circle, Mountain Rest, SC, 29664. Telephone: 864-638-9568