Lower Darnell Creek Falls, Rabun County, Georgia

Another day adventure with the dogs while vacationing in the mountains of North Carolina and northern Georgia.  Darnell Creek Falls is located in eastern Clayton (east of US23/441) in Rabun County, Georgia.  This adventure took us a little bit to find as we got to the area Google maps lead us to and then we were not sure which direction to go when the road split - hopefully these photographs (and words) will help you such that you don't have the same problem. We didn't have the clearly written directions in the book written by Mark Oleg Ozboyd yet (I bought that later this same day).

First, as you travel down the main road (Kelly's Creek Road), you'll eventually have to decide which fork in the road to take.

Here's your clue.  The right side goes up to "private property" as that's a subdivision called Chestnut Mountain Estates.  The left side looked a lot like it was a driveway to someone's house with the mailbox posted and a building almost out of view.  Take the left side!  It's actually a road and you can take it on past the house and continue onward.

I think Mark said it correctly "to a confusing fork with three roads" although we saw two and were confused.  You'll drive over Darnell Creek on a bridge in about .1 miles.  I am betting this area is stunning when the fall colors come...

So now we are sitting here - yet another fork in the road - which way?  Well, this was our Google map.

This doesn't show a fork in the road and we could hear water running, so we decided to park and explore.

This is a bad picture (hand held and the shutter speed was in the gutter).  But, I think you can get the idea that this sign is nailed to a tree, this is where we parked.

This is the road that we saw - after walking down this a short path, we realized that there is a small parking area at the end for a few cars.  But hey, the dogs were ready to get out of the car, so we parked and headed down this path.

Yes, that's Jim with the dogs out front, Rue, Abby and Ollie.  This is a short walk down to the Lower Darnell Creek waterfall - we were there during the week and not another soul was around - we had it all to ourselves.

So, now we have gotten to the actual parking lot, oh well - it was definitely less than a half mile to get to this point.  If you park here, then you probably only have a few hundred yards to the waterfall.

This is the lower Darnell Creek waterfall.  A huge log in front of it - well, thankfully it was an easy fix using Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop to remove that log (much easier than getting in the water and attempting to move it!).  However, this is what the waterfall looked like when we arrived (for the other photograph click on the link at the bottom of this post). This has an excellent swimming hole should you want to take a dip in this cool water.

As we started taking photographs, Abby, our big black dog was fine and then in distress over something with one of her paws.  We checked everywhere to see if there was anything that could have bit her and finally determined that she most likely was stung by a wasp, hornet - her paw bothered her for a little bit but did not swell up.  Thankfully she was fine within 15 minutes - but that cut this hike short.

We didn't know about the upper Darnell Creek falls which apparently was the other fork in the road to the left - so that will wait for us on another day.

A visit to the Rabun County visitor center gave us a bit more information on what this trail was all about as well as the book I mentioned in the previous post which has lots of wonderful information on waterfalls in this area.

To view all of the photographs from this hike, click here - Darnell Creek Falls, Rabun County, Georgia