ENTERTAINMENT GUIDE
S.C. DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES
THE POST AND COURIER
THE POST AND COURIER
The painted bunting is among the many species that make Botany Bay a birder’s paradise .
Keep an eye out. Gators are a common sight in the Lowcountry wilderness.
Richard Porcher paddles along the bank of Wambaw Creek in the Francis Marion National Forest.
along a jagged rock trail on the Blue Ridge Escarpment and works its way to a rock outcropping. The rock, as tall as a football field is long, bears an eerie resemblance to the iconic El Capitan peak in California’s Yosemite Valley. It’s demanding and scenic enough that Backpacker Magazine included the trip as the South Carolina day hike of choice in a recent edition.
South Carolina. The centuries-old farm is a vista of hardwoods and pine stands, crop fields, salt marshes, hummock islands and a maritime forest beach with its own “boneyard” — a ghost forest of dead trees in the surf at high tide. It includes a three-mile motor tour trail nicely suited to peddling, past 19th-century brick and tabby structures. It also has 20 more miles of trails for hiking, biking, birding and horseback riding, fishing ponds and a “throw” launch into Osceola Creek for paddle-powered boats. Watch for painted buntings.
are prized, open and free camping for paddlers, but so are the Lake Marion dam release-dependent sandbars of the Upper Santee River. The Blue Ridge in the Upstate is replete with state park, business and back country camp sites. Berkeley Blueways is putting together an overnight paddling camp trail around the cypress cove rim of Lake Moultrie. For the more adventurous, there’s open sea expeditions to Capers Island in the Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge or Otter Island in St. Helena Sound Heritage Preserve; both require permits from S.C. Department of Natural Resources. There are camp sites along the Palmetto Trail through woods and wetlands of Francis Marion National Forest. But, ssssh. Don’t tell anyone else. (Besides, it’s not even in the state.)
The ‘I don’t want to play that hard’ trip Botany Bay Plantation Wildlife Management Area. Botany Bay Road. Edisto Island. One hour. One of the coolest, casual, off-road summer bike trips around, mostly because at the end you can hop off into the Atlantic Ocean. A 5,000-acre oceanfront plantation that was willed by its former owner to the people of
The ‘best’ camping Various. Can’t help you here; it depends too much on individual taste. The black willow sandbars of the Edisto River
Black Mou nta i n Ca mpg rou nd, Busick, N.C., is a Pisgah National Forest fee-paid site just off the Blue Ridge Parkway in a cove at the foot of Mount Mitchell, the tallest mountain in the East. Simple, quiet and deepwoods enough that owls haunt the tent sites at night and precautions are taken for black bears. Rest rooms, showers, prized trout fishing along the South Toe River and tubing farther down. Hikers can pick among any number of spectacular trails from the half-mile Devil’s Den Forest Walk through the steep cove to the 13-mile, 4,000 feet up and down summit of Mitchell itself (not for the queasy.) ✦ To watch a video tour of a Lowcountry wilderness by Bo Petersen, visit mycharlestononline.com.
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