New U.S. Park Like ‘Walking Through a Time Machine’

The country’s newest national park doesn’t have the awe of the Grand Canyon or the massive peaks of the Smoky Mountains. Instead, the majesty of Congaree National Park whispers like the sounds of a soft breeze mumbling through the old-growth forest settled in a flood plain.

It used to be called Congaree Swamp National Monument, and it doesn’t take long to find the knobby-kneed cypress, black water and musty air of the bottomlands. But the 22,000-acre park along the Congaree River in central South Carolina is much more than that.

“It’s a subtle beauty. The deeper you go, the deeper you get immersed in it,” park Ranger Fran Rametta said.

The park is home to some of the largest trees along the East Coast, including a state-record loblolly pine that measures 16 feet around and reaches 145 feet into the sky. The old-growth forest is the only one left in the United States. The state’s biggest oxbow lake is here, created when a bend on the Congaree River got left behind.

Congaree National Park, 30 minutes from Columbia, contains more diverse plant and animal life per acre than any place around -- 50 species of mammals, 75 varieties of trees, 170 types of birds, more than 700 plants and countless insects.

Researchers have found 163 types of water beetles. “That doesn’t even count the land beetles. Usually we count them tenfold compared to the ones on the water,” Rametta said.

Look skyward and there might be bald eagles, ospreys or owls. On the ground, there are feral pigs, deer, salamanders and maybe even a bobcat or coyote.

Diversity is certainly the park’s claim to fame. Several hundred yards from the swamps is an old-growth forest with towering trees blocking the sunlight. A few hundred yards more, up the 2 1/2-mile elevated boardwalk, are new trees taking advantage of clearings created when Hurricane Hugo wiped out some of the old growth in 1989. The rotting trees sit nearby, full of bugs and small critters.

It’s all unique because much of the land along the rivers of the Southeast has been developed or destroyed as the waterways are dammed, Rametta said.

“There’s no other place like this anywhere,” he said.

Rametta should know. He came to Congaree more than two decades ago, just a few years after a group of South Carolinians banded together against timber companies and kept them from cutting down the old-growth forest by getting the land in the southeastern part of Richland County declared a national monument. The year was 1976.

Rametta moved from Great Smoky Mountains National Park -- “they thought I was crazy.” But he loves walking through the forest and seeing things in much the same way they were 10,000 years ago.

“I tell the children it’s like walking through a time machine,” Rametta said.

The park has 20 miles of trails, including a canoe trail, and primitive campsites available by permit.

Just because it is now a national park doesn’t mean the land doesn’t face threats. It’s not far downstream from Columbia’s wastewater treatment plant, and acid rain has been detected for much of the last decade. The park has just nine employees, so it takes a while to clean up litter or even change the brown signs along state Highway 48 to read “National Park” instead of “National Monument.”

Otherwise, life is good at Congaree.

Barely a peep was raised as Sen. Ernest F. Hollings (D-S.C.) spearheaded efforts to earn South Carolina its first national park. The new designation came Nov. 10. National park status should raise its visibility, increasing the number of visitors to about 200,000 a year.