Welcome back to National Parks & other public lands with T! If you are seeing this on Twitter or Facebook, please visit the blog to see all of the photos and read the story by clicking the link.
Congaree National Park in South Carolina protects the old growth forest on the floodplain of the Congaree River. When we were there, we thought it a swamp because the Cypress trees we saw were submerged in water. It is technically not a swamp, but a ‘bottomland’ subject to periodic flooding.
The Sierra Club and grassroots environmental groups fought to save Congaree from destruction by the logging industry in the Sixties. This park preserves one of the largest collections of ‘Champion Trees’ (a Champion Tree being the largest known of its species.)
It was declared a National Monument in the Seventies and converted to National Park status in 2003.
We stopped at Congaree on a road trip in the Spring of 2010. We picked up a Junior Ranger booklet and perused the exhibits in the visitors center. We watched the short film and then walked the two-mile boardwalk loop.
It was quite humid and buggy, so we were grateful for the elevated path.
There were only a handful of others in the park, so we pretty much had the loop to ourselves. At one point, we startled a snake sunning itself in the middle of the walkway.
Location: 100 National Park Rd, Hopkins, SC 29061
Designation: National Park
Date designated or established: 11/10/2003
Date of my visit: 4/08/2010
Wow! The places you’ve been! So beautiful!
Thanks!
One of the less visited parks, it is still very interesting. It is said the “Swamp Fox” of the American Revolution hid out in the swamp there.
Interesting! Thanks for commenting!💗
So beautiful – I’d never heard of that park! I will have to stop by next time I’m in the area
I hadn’t either before I mapped out the roadtrip 😀
Awesome! I had NO idea this was there, like some of the other places you post. Will work this into my trip to Cowpens. Thank you again for making us all aware!
Cool! Be sure to check out the website…I think there is more to do there than just walking the boardwalk loop (Saw guided ranger kayak trip somewhere on their page, I think) but we had hours of driving ahead of us so we didn’t explore as much as we would have liked.
The bugs are pretty relentless! I just missed the lightning bugs when I went in early June. So glad to see another national park aficionado, keep at it! 🙂
And mosquitoes will usually find me, no matter where I am, lol! Thanks for your comment and follow 🙂
Mosquitoes in my neck of the woods carry the Zika virus, West Nile virus and St. Louis Encephalitis.
Nasty bugs 🦟
“Why did it have to be snakes? I hate snakes!” — Indiana Jones
Was that a poisonous snake?
😂 Ha, but no giant runaway boulder in this park. I’m not sure, but we gave it a wide berth just in case.