I Return to Paris Mountain State Park

I recently returned to Paris Mountain State Park for the first time in over two years. That was the place I went to almost every day years ago. But once I began to expand my hiking choices, and once I got interested in landscape photography, I could see that the photo opportunities were greater elsewhere.

My trip was primarily to renew my SC State Park’s annual passport. They can be bought online but there’s no way to get the senior discount (which cuts the cost in half) without visiting a park office. Paris Mountain is the closest State Park for me. Oddly, I remembered incorrectly that it took an hour to get there. As it turns out, in a little over half an hour I was at the closed Park gate. My intention was to get there at opening time; missed that by almost half an hour.

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Honey, What In The Heck Are You Doing Over There?

Back in March 2012, I was still doing a lot of hiking on the trails at Paris Mountain State Park. Most days I would park my car in one of the parking areas near Lake Placid, close to the front gate. I would walk down the hill to the lake, look around a little, take a photo or two if I saw something interesting, then back up the hill and down toward the dam.

A few minutes later I would be at the other end of the lake, ready to head off into the woods, if that was my intended hike for the day. There are a lot of different trailheads at Paris Mountain, and so each day was a decision as to which one I might hike.

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A Tree Named Silver Saved My Hide

When I was six years old, my father gave up farming on our little sharecropper's farm and got a factory job. We moved a few miles down the road to an old frame house with a tin roof, with the new luxury of running water. The house had a dirt front yard and an outhouse in back. It was a white house, sorely in need of paint, with a crumbling gray-colored front porch, a house quite close to the paved country road but surrounded by forest on three sides. Although small by today’s standards, it was a mansion compared to the three-room shack where I spent my first six years.

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