Congaree National Park

Visited: Sept 2017

Nearby city: Columbia, SC

Congaree is a small and unique park in the southeast. South Carolina's lone national park. The Park protects the largest contiguous expanse of old growth bottomland hardwood forest left in the entire United States. The bald cypress, water tupelo, loblolly pine and champion trees you find here are the tallest trees along the East Coast.

Although you might quickly refer to this place as a swamp (even the NPS named it Congaree Swamp National Monument when it was first created in 1976), this place is actually a level floodplain. A swamp is wetland forest that has standing water year-round saturating the land and is occasionally broken up by hammocks, or protrusions of dry land. In contrast, a floodplain is flat land that experiences periodic flooding. Floods in Congaree National Park occur in late winter and early spring. This is the best time of year to visit the Park. Summers are a bad time to visit, due to the mosquitoes. Make sure to bring bug spray. The Visitor's Center has a handy (and humorous) mosquito meter.

The Visitor Center is very convenient to the Park Entrance and should be your first stop to learn about the history of the area. Despite the consistent flooding, this area was not conducive for agriculture. Logging proved very difficult as well, due to the complications of hauling logging equipment in the extremely muddy and wet earth. As logging technology improved, the Sierra Club stepped in, realizing that this kind of forest was disappearing quickly. Congaree Swamp National Monument was created in 1976, and it became a National Park in 2003. 

model tree at the Visitor's Center

The thing to do here is walk the 2.4 mile roundtrip Boardwalk Trail. It's a nice pleasant hike, and gives you a good taste of this environment. It's elevated, so you don't have to worry about getting all muddy. If you wish, there are trails that branch off of the boardwalk, such as the Oak Ridge, Kingsnake, and River Trails. There are also good ranger programs, the most popular being the Owl Prowl, a night time trek into the forest to find these cool birds.

  

Weston Lake

Tara espied this spider chilling in its beautiful web high above the Boardwalk

Honestly, Congaree is probably a place we would have not gone to but for the goal to visit all National Parks. We did enjoy our stay, but I wouldn't recommend going too far out of your way to visit. That said, it is important that we learn about and protect these unique environments. Walking through the Boardwalk was an interesting journey back in time, and gives you a feel of what most of the southeastern United States looked like before development and civilization. For more info, check out the NPS website: https://www.nps.gov/cong/index.htm