My Corner Online

King Creek Falls at Burrells Ford Recreation Area

We hiked to King Creek Falls at the Burrells Ford Recreation Area in Mountain Rest, South Carolina on June 29, 2025. The website shows a beautiful 70 foot drop falls, but all we saw behind the sound of a rushing water was fallen debris from Hurricane Helene. The falls were heard by not seen due to the damage of fallen trees.

This is the map to the falls.

We had trouble finding the right hiking trail and were glad to see this sign so we knew we were on the right trail. We did walk a mile total which goes along with the .5 here on the sign. Hubby walked even further just to be sure while I waited, and saw nothing more.

This is one of those times I have no words to describe. This is why I like to go vacationing "gypsy style" as you find things you would not otherwise find. Hurricane Helene in September 2024 caused major damage in this area and I was able to see it first hand. I do not think I captured it well in video as I was too concentrated on the landscape before me. The trail was on the side of a hill (or mountain) and above us were massive trees on their sides, and below us were massive trees on their sides. Where it crossed the trail, workers had cut a section out of the fallen logs which we walked through. I would have had to have worked a lot harder to capture the perspective.

The sheer number of downed trees was incredible alone. I keep thinking about how we were seeing how powerful God's creation in the beautiful waterfalls, but here we saw how powerful God's creation in the destruction. We walked right through it all. It was something else and probably more memorable than a lot of the other hikes we went on.

We almost turned around here as it looked like we could not get through, but the trail did go around this huge downed tree root ball.

There was a new bridge across the creek. The workers deserve big kudos for getting out there and making this trail open again to the public. That was a lot of trees to cut through to allow the trail to be open again.