South Mountains State Park

A couple weeks ago I had the pleasure of going on a camping trip with some friends.  Destination:  South Mountains State Park.  It was a blast.  My favorite part actually turned out to be what I was afraid of. 

We left on Friday after work, which meant we would arrive at the campsite late.  After taking our sweet time getting there (even driving around searching for the Russel Stover outlet on the way) we made it about 10 minutes before the gates to the park closed (whoops, that was close)!  Then we discovered that all the car camping places were already taken, and we'd have to hike out to a campsite.  Ouch!  That's exactly what I was afraid of!  We had no backpacks, and it was dark and we only had one headlamp!  We ended up strapping whatever we could fit on our backs and biking in the dark to the campsite about 2 miles away.  Once we got there it was awesome, until we realized that we forgot to bring something to make fire with!  :)  Fortunately there was one other group not too far away and they gave us some fire.

Blake showed us how to make "boy scout burgers" - a ton of hamburger meat and onion and spices smashed down inside aluminum foil and thrown directly in the fire.  Those were great.  The next night we made s'mores as well, which I hadn't done since I was a little kid in the boy scouts.

We went mountain biking and hiking all over.  The biking was amazing - it was incredibly difficult going uphill (I did a lot of walking and pushing my bike uphill!) and it was incredible SCARY going downhill!  A couple of times I thought for sure I was going to go flying over my handle bars and tumbling down a mountain side!  The highlight of the hiking was High Shoals Falls.  It was at the top of t his 80 foot waterfall that I realized my brand new phone was designed by a moron.