Despite its reputation among some park-goers, Congaree National Park, which is located in Tri-County Electric Cooperative territory in Hopkins, is an ecological treasure that’s home to such precious creatures as rare synchronous fireflies.
Photo by Thomas Hammond
You won’t catch me at Congaree National Park this time of the year; I can’t stand the mosquitoes. But in the 15 years I’ve lived in Columbia, I’ve adopted Congaree as one of my special places.
It’s where, in less buggy seasons, I’ve spent humid hours walking alone and with friends, slipped in relentless mud, been turned around by flooded trails, practiced training my dog and learned to appreciate big, knobby trees and quiet forests. There’s a lot I haven’t done there yet, either. I’ve never camped out or kayaked at the park, but at least I also haven’t been chased by a wild hog.
Congaree National Park is one of the places where I grew my love of the outdoors. And it’s a place where, long before it became a national park, a young Alex Sanders grew up duck hunting and learning from his hunting-guide father about principles of ecology.
Sanders, a former state lawmaker, judge and College of Charleston president, is the man at the center of what is, these days, a relatively little-known tale behind the creation of Congaree National Park. In the early 1970s, Sanders organized a swamp expedition near the confluence of the Congaree and Wateree rivers that purported to have discovered the call of the rare, possibly extinct ivory-billed woodpecker. That the precious bird might have existed in the forest, the story has been told, helped save the land from logging so that it eventually was enshrined first as a national monument and later, in 2003, a national park.
“It was my mission to save the trees,” Sanders says. “What I wanted was for it to be left alone, not made a tourist attraction.”
Sanders believes Congaree National Park would’ve been created with or without him and his seeming encounter with the ivory-billed woodpecker. And it’s true that a number of compelling forces at work over time—politics, business, environmentalism and more—did the work of preserving the park’s 27,000 acres.
My most special experience at Congaree happened several years ago with my colleagues from The Statenewspaper when we witnessed the annual mating show of the park’s synchronous fireflies. You can’t comprehend the mesmerizing beauty of that event until you’ve stood, hushed, in the damp, darkened forest and watched with your own eyes the fireflies glow in unison with one another. This spectacle of synchronicity happens in only a few places on this continent, and Congaree park is one of them.
It’s a breath-taking scene I urge people to witness if they get the opportunity.
These days, admission to see the fireflies’ display is restricted by a lottery to limit the impact of crowds in the forest. I love that many people are getting to experience this dreamy phenomenon, and I’m more than grateful that essential steps are being taken to protect the flashy critters and their environment from their adoring fans.
Alex Sanders never wanted to see this beautiful place overwhelmed by visitors who would endanger the resources that he and others strived to save. I can’t blame him. My whole heart agrees with him when he says, “We need places that have been left alone.” I’d say the same for any of our national parks and for much of the land beyond them, even down to the simple, wooded rural acres in places like where I grew up and where many South Carolina co-op members live, too.
I’ll bet 50 weeks out of the year, there’s little danger of Congaree being over-trodden. It is, after all, one of the lesser-known and most poorly reviewed (though unjustly so) national parks in the country, as you’ll read in this month’s cover story. But the annual two weeks of synchronous firefly viewing magnetize crowds to the forest, and there’s something to be said for the exposure to this uniquely beautiful place we have in our backyard here in South Carolina.
And whether it was by activism, politics, business, a bird or some lucky combination of reasons, Congaree National Park has been preserved for those fireflies, for me, for you, and for many generations to come, and I am thankful.