Whenever we take the dog on a trip with us, we try to find things that we can do with her, and since we’re outdoorsy, that usually means a nice little day hike! Unfortunately, Angie recently injured her knee so we tried to find some easier walks to prevent further damage. But luckily for us we found 2 great trails in our recent trip! We were staying in Helen, GA, and there was an awesome waterfall there, and then on our way back home we stopped at a nearby state park to make the drive a bit more bearable.

Chris has his serious face on, but Tifa was loving the trail!

Our first stop Saturday morning was Anna Ruby Falls. Before we could get on the trail, we had to figure out the parking payment situation. As it turns out, the falls are in Federal land, but the road to get there is through a State park(Unicoi State park). We are totally guilty of being cashless millenials, so we only had cash to pay one parking fee, whoops. Luckily Unicoi State park only charges if you’re going to park there, so since we were just driving through we were o.k. The trail was already crowded, so we were glad we were up relatively early! We’re not huge crowd people, but the dog positively hates crowds, but the paved path was wide so it never felt like a shuffle or like we were in the way of those travelling the opposite way. And as much as she hates the people involved with crowds, the dog loves the smells, so she was very content with the trip up to the falls.

The recent rainfall made the view so spectacular, it’s a huge set of waterfalls and the extra water really made the upper falls more noticeable as well. The cascading falls were so elegant and really looked like something from a painting thanks to the added volume as well. We both love a good hike, but Angie likes waterfalls more than scenic views, so this was well worth the crowds. But with lots of people waiting, we didn’t want to spend too much time on the boardwalk viewing platforms, so it was off to let the dog rest at our cabin while we enjoyed the town.

Our second little walk was on our trip back home. When we take road trips we like to break up the day by stopping if there’s a nearby park or attraction, so even though we were only driving 4 hours total we thought a little detour was in order. Sweetwater Creek State Park was only about 15 minutes off our planned route, and seemed like there were a few easy trails to the main draw of the park, an old textile mill.

This trail wasn’t paved, but was still mostly flat and pretty wide, its clearly one of the more trafficked trails in the park, though there are a lot more we’ll definitely be back to explore. The mill is tragically gorgeous, old architecture is always so fascinating to us, but like so much of the south the mill was destroyed during the Civil War. To protect it from further damage there’s a big fence around the whole thing which takes away from the view, but is totally understandable given the trash and graffiti we found littering the area. (Which is anther reason we prefer longer, more backcountry hikes, but that’s anther story) Chris loves history, so it was great to be on a hike in the woods and basically come upon this seemingly abandoned, forgotten piece of the past.

We were also pleased to see there was access to the stream nearby, so we had to relax a bit by the water before we went back. We chose a little eddy a bit further away from the other people and were quite content until we saw we weren’t alone. On the rock in front of us, a massive water snake was sunbathing as well, so we figured our was time to leave the water and get back on the road home.