Three and a half hours of footage. That’s what this day produced. I started the edit wondering how to trim it into something resembling a coherent episode and ended the day in a city I didn’t expect to fall for.
State thirty-two. South Carolina.
Missy Grace and the Outpost Inn
Before leaving Highlands I had a conversation with Missy Grace, the assistant general manager at the Outpost, and she gave me more in five minutes than the website had in however long I spent looking at it.
The Outpost has been an inn in some form for thirty years — the Chandler Inn, then the Wells Hotel, then purchased in 2022 by Jason Reeves, who came at it with a background in design and something rarer than that: genuine feeling for the place. He reopened it one room at a time, closing off each one until he was ready, and his approach to each was to walk in and listen to what the room wanted to be. Every room has a personality. The fireplace rooms, the sitting lounges, the details that aren’t coordinated so much as decided individually. The deer head in my room makes more sense in that context. Someone felt that room and put a deer in it.
There’s a sauna opening in the spring. A coffee bar already in place. Fire pits outside. The sister property is on Main Street if you want the full Highlands experience. I’ll put the info below.
Fourteen rooms. Worth every dollar.
The Waterfall Circuit
I’d been building toward Whitewater Falls all morning and arrived to find the conditions stacked against me: cloudless sky, direct midday sun, no color in the January light. The worst possible combination for waterfall photography. You need cloud cover. You need the soft, directionless light that comes through an overcast sky and lets the water show itself without blowing out in the highlights.
I shot it anyway. It came out about as expected from conditions like those. The falls themselves are spectacular — the highest cascade east of the Mississippi, dropping over four hundred feet in multiple tiers through the Nantahala National Forest. In October, with fall color and cloud cover and proper preparation, this would be a session I’d plan a trip around.
January, cloudless, wasn’t that. I took the shots and moved on.
About My Dad
I was talking to myself in the car on the drive down toward Cashiers — three cameras running, which I mention because I am aware of how that looks to anyone who happens to glance in — and thinking out loud about my father.
He passed away at sixty. The same age I turned this year, the same age that became the whole reason for this project. He was a quiet man in a lot of ways, not someone who expressed his inner life easily, but he loved road trips. He loved being in a car going somewhere. I’ve been driving through these mountains thinking about what he might have made of all of this — the waterfalls, the ridgelines, the stops that happen because something catches your eye and you just pull over.
He would have pulled over too. I know that about him.
I didn’t plan to say any of that on camera. It came out anyway. Some things do.
Greenville
I had created an AI image of Greenville before this trip started — one of those renderings to get excited about a place I’d never been. It was an approximation, artistic and imprecise, a guess at what the city might feel like. Standing on the bridge over Reedy River Falls that evening, I thought about that image and how far short of the reality it had come.
The short version: someone removed a four-lane highway bridge that had been running over Reedy River Falls for decades, blocking the falls from view and cutting the city off from its own waterfront. They replaced it with a pedestrian bridge, restored the falls, built a park along both banks, added an amphitheater, brought in artist studios and restaurants and the kind of life that a downtown waterfront generates when you give it the room to exist. Falls Park on the Reedy is the result, and it is one of the best things I’ve seen in thirty-two states.
The Grand Bohemian Lodge overlooks the whole thing from one side. Hall’s Chophouse has tables by the windows looking straight at the bridge and the water. A jazz club called Blues Boulevard had Anita Baker coming through the speakers when I walked past — twenty-five dollars for either of two shows that night, and I was out of time.
I went back to the hotel. My room at the Hampton was right on the corner overlooking the riverfront. I lay there looking at the lights on the falls and thought: whoever decided to tear that bridge out deserved every award they got.
Favorite city of the whole trip. Thirty-two states in. Who knew.
