Anderson Author Creates Useful Guidebook to Upstate Waterfalls

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

For Anderson author and outdoor enthusiast Thomas King, nothing in natural speaks like waterfalls.

King, author of “Waterfall Hikes of Upstate South Carolina,” was born in Anderson 81 years ago, and has spent his years moving through the Upstate with the patience of a cataloguer and the appetite of a hiker who never quite stopped being curious.

Born at Anderson Memorial Hospital, King grew up in Anderson, attended Kennedy Street Elementary School under principal Roy Brown, and worked his way through T.L. High School, Forrest College, and Anderson College before becoming an accountant. His education in numbers helped him keep exacting track of the world and he applied that knowledge in his hiking to document trails leading to waterfalls.

He did not begin as a writer with a grand plan. He began, instead, as someone whose friends got driver’s licenses and started following topographical maps into the hills. In those early days, trails were often little more than promises drawn across mountain sides, and sometimes they had to be made by hand, with branches cut back and brush pushed aside to make a way through. King and his companions went every weekend. They followed lines on maps, then found out what those lines meant underfoot.

Eventually, hiking became more than a pastime. After King retired in 2001, the outings grew more deliberate, the notes more exact, the desire to see how many waterfalls were out there more insistent. He started carrying a GPS unit, measuring distances, documenting routes, and later photographing the falls himself. The photographs, he said, were what pushed the idea into print. People kept telling him he ought to put them in a book. So he did, first independently, then with the University of Georgia Press, which published later editions and helped turn a personal trail log into a regional guidebook.

What distinguishes King’s book from a simple picture book is its practical information. The book includes road directions, trail details, and the kind of information that makes the difference between an afternoon walk and a search party. He said he heard from readers, especially from out of state, who were grateful for the directions because otherwise they might never have found the trailhead at all. This makes the about more than waterfalls to a book about access, and about persuading people that the Upstate contains more than they have been taught to notice.

The work also has the feel of devotion. King said he has charted the 147 waterfalls included in the latest edition, and perhaps a few more besides. He has seen snakes, too, including, in one memorable episode, a rattlesnake he mistook at first for a floating limb in the creek. By the time he recognized what was drifting toward him, the reptile was between his feet. He handled it by using his camera strap as a kind of improvised diversion, then continued with the business of the day. It was not the kind of anecdote that makes a man sound reckless; it made him sound practiced.

Not every waterfall had to be fought for, but some did. King described crawling under rhododendron bushes on all fours, stumbling into hidden pools, and making trail where the trail guide had long since gone stale.

His body, inevitably, paid a price. Arthritis has crept in, the result of the weight of a 30-pound pack loaded mostly with camera equipment, the physical tally from the decades of moving through rough terrain. And yet he also suggested that the exertion was part of the medicine. The hikers he knows who stayed active, he noted, were often the ones still around to talk about it later in life.

For King, the question of favorites has an answer that is almost philosophical in its simplicity. Asked whether he had a preferred waterfall, he said the one he is standing at is always the favorite. Each one, he explained, has its own atmosphere, its own character, its own small authority over the person who has reached it. That answer could stand for the whole book: not a ranking of scenery, but a record of attention.

He is still, in a sense, walking through the legacy of a much younger self. He recalled, with obvious pride, a 1963 trek in which he and a few friends walked from downtown Anderson to Table Rock State Park in a single day, completing 50 miles after sunrise and before the light gave out. The route, he said, was part of a broader fitness challenge inspired by the President John F. Kennedy era’s call to exercise, though the feat itself now sounds closer to folk heroism than civic campaign. There were practice walks to Clemson, Belton, Greenville, and Abbeville, blisters earned and thunderstorm retreats taken.

That physical history, in the end, seems inseparable from the book’s appeal. King is not simply describing waterfalls as destinations. He is describing the human labor of reaching them, the persistence required to keep looking, and the older idea that a place can be known only by returning to it enough times to let it change you. He said he wanted people to see what they are missing by staying home: the scenery, the trails, the scale of the Upstate nature itself.