“Never heard of it” is the response I’d get when I told people this was my 3rd stop on our journey. Established as a national park in 2003, Congaree is one of the newer parks and is home to some of the highest concentration of trees of record height – there is a loblolly pine that is 159 ft tall. Ok, cool, so it has trees. That’s kind of what I thought before we went on the Boardwalk hike. The fact that no one has heard of this place actually played to our advantage since it wasn’t very busy and we had plenty of the park to enjoy to ourselves.
We arrived in the evening but it was still too scorching hot (apparently this heat wave is a bit abnormal this time of year – so say the locals) to set up camp so we sat in the air-conditioned RV at the visitor center for a bit to wait til the sun went down further. We then drove our scooters to the Longleaf campground to set up camp about a mile down the road. I had Rocky down by my feet when he decided to jump off while going about 10 mph and floppingly rolled to a stop then popped up and ran toward me. Fortunately the car behind me saw him and stopped in time! I held him tightly in one arm the rest of the way. Hopefully I’ll get his front carrier soon so I can more safely scoot around with him.
Still hot at 8 pm, we took our time setting up camp and heated up some soup over our pocket rocket burner.
So Congaree is one of the very few places on earth that a certain species of synchronous fireflies convene and blink on and off around the same time and it just so happened that they gather the last week in May and first week in June. Very unique! Despite the beautiful lightening bugs, it was very difficult to fall asleep and our battery powered fan conked out after only about 1 hr of use! If the heat made it hard to fall asleep, the sounds were worse – it was 10 times louder at night with various disharmonious frogs and birds and falling branches startling us awake. Rocky turned into a guard dog and emitted a low continuous growl for about 1/3 of the night. It finally started to cool off around 3 am and I switched to sleeping in the hammock and got about 2-3 good hours of sleep. Below are the sounds I woke up to.
Below is the sight I woke up to.
Despite the lack of good sleep. We were still in good spirits and had enough energy to enjoy a freeze-dried breakfast to supply us with enough calories to last us about 6 miles of hiking that morning. After applying liberal amounts of bug spray, we hiked to the visitor center to learn a bit more about the park and then took the Boardwalk Trail and ended with the Bluff Trail.
The trees were pretty impressive. A fellow hiker handed us a brochure that had numbers for a self-guided tour and I’m thankful he gave it to us as it pointed out things like an old moonshine still or record breaking trees that we otherwise wouldn’t have noticed. The amount of wildlife was even more impressive! We saw an owl, water snake, woodpecker, alligator and a wide variety of colorful lizards. This proved to us that Congaree was more than just a mosquito-infested swamp.
These Bald Cyprus trees had “knees” that came out of the ground that supposedly allow for more stability of there massive trunks.
The last leg of our trail was the Bluff loop which was a little less sheltered by leaves. Despite adequate water breaks, our dog decided to give up and just lay on the ground so we had to carry him the last .5 miles back to the campsite. Once there, we enjoyed lunch, napped in the hammock and then packed up.
We had originally planned to spend 2 nights at the campsite but after one sticky, sleepless night we both agreed that our air conditioned RV would be a welcome respite despite the good memories had. Hopefully we’ll come across some cooler days to tent-camp in some of the other parks.
I ended up finding an RV park in Savannah, GA with the limited reception we had at the campsite and it turned out to be a pretty fancy one (Creekfire Motor Ranch) with a gated entrance, a nice big pool, hot tub, beautiful bathrooms (with gator skin stalls!) laundry and a very level campsite. It was worth the little extra we payed to have these amenities after a stinky night of camping. Rocky even got his first bath of the trip!
Happy trails!
Class C M.D. 