Stone Mountain State Park NC Site #66. I was relieved to find out I booked the right day/time/place when we checked in, since I’ve been known to mess up those things in the past. I told this to the lady checking in and she said that sometimes people book campsites at Stone Mountain Georgia and show up here instead. Just that day two people asked her where to find the tram to the top. Too bad for them, it’s 328 miles away in a different state.
We’ve been here a bunch of times before. The namesake of the park is a huge big section of the mountain with exposed granite, they call it a bald mountain. I wanted to be up on that west-facing bald mountain to watch the sunset at 6pm. We saw info online that said everyone has to be off the trails by the time the park closes at 6. We figured we’d watch the sunset and then hike the mile back down so we’d be out by 6:15. When we started the hike, there were a bunch of signs saying you had to be off the trails by 5:30, and even a ranger was at the trailhead telling us the same thing when we started at 4:45. I guess they don’t want people falling down the slope after dark. We hiked some of the way up to a still-very-cool view point, but not the peak, and turned back around because I’m a rule follower.
Back at the campsite the sun did go down even though we couldn’t see it, and it got pretty cold in short order. Joe started a fire and I put on all my warm clothes, but it really wasn’t enough for me to be out there very long. I was in the van and Joe came in and said “I haven’t seen this many stars since the last time I said I haven’t seen this many stars!”, and he was right.
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