Table Rock / Foothills backpacking

Two weekends in a row for backpacking hasn't happened in a long time but after not officially camping in Shining Rock I was thrilled to head out with my son last weekend.

We planned on a 5 mile hike of the Foothills trail starting in Table Rock State Park.   The trail is steep and it was extremely hot but we were making good progress and I was glad to be out there.

At lunch we sat on a rocky bald with a view.  This is where the apple I had carried for lunch rolled down and launched itself off a cliff.  At least my sandwich wan't shaped like a ball.

As we approached within a mile of our campsite we encountered a hiker coming from the other direction.  He filled us in on some other campers up ahead of us and we realized our favorite site had already been claimed.  We decided to head on and see what was going on.

After evaluating a small campsite beside a small creek we decided to hike about a mile back and set up camp at a site we had passed earlier.

It didn't take long for us to get our tent setup and a fire going.

We discovered some wildlife in our campsite.  There was this guy. . .

also a large spider, a frog, a snail, and a scorpion were all found living in the fire ring.
We let all of the above creatures live as they didn't seem to be bothering our fire.

After toting a previously blogged about bear canister for the day I was glad to take it out of my bag and use it as a camp stool.  Once opened it also provided me with some dinner.  I was mostly interested to see how it would fare during the night.  Instead of attempting to find an appropriate place to hang food I decided to cram some rocks around the canister and store it away from the camp.

In the morning I was thrilled to find our stash completely untouched.

The views continued to beautiful and the weather was much easier as we hiked out Sunday morning around 8am.  Because of our Saturday afternoon back tracking we only had about four and a half miles to head out.

We made it back to the car in record speed.

This allowed us to beat the intense heat of the coming afternoon and allowed us to leave the park before the large crowds gathered at the waterfall to swim.

Here's an upside down view of our hike on the Foothills Trail:

Oh, and remember that scorpion I mentioned earlier?  He came home with us!!!!!!!
As I was on the porch unpacking my bag I pulled my sleeping bag out from the bottom of the pack and I felt a bite on my stomach.  I brushed it off, looked down, and there was a scorpion on my porch!!!!  He quickly ducked between some boards but we got a good view of under the porch, knocked him to the dirt and stabbed him dead with a wooden stake.  It took me about an hour to calm down from that.  I couldn't believe I had accidentally brought home such an awful creature.

After two weekends spent in the woods I think I'll be content to spend this coming weekend laying down watching movies.  At least I can't pick up any more scorpions that way.

There are additional photos from our trip posted HERE for anyone that is interested.