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Worth the trip
Sunrise at Boneyard Beach shows the power of nature to sculpt the shoreline of what was once a forested part of the island.
Photo by Tim Hanson
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Still standing
The taller of the historic beacons on Lighthouse Island guided countless ships away from the coastline for decades until it was shut down in the summer of 1947.
Photo by Tim Hanson
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Witness to history
Thomas W. Graham III, a lifelong resident of McClellanville, accompanies visitors to Lighthouse Island during guided trips staged four times each year. He remembers his father showing him the taller lighthouse in its final days of operation. “There was just this tiny light on the horizon,” Graham says. “My dad said, ‘I want you to see this because that light is going to be turned off forever.’”
Photo by Tim Hanson
It is dark out here on Boneyard Beach, maybe an hour before sunrise on this mild October morning on Bulls Island. But the sky is clear, and someone in our group points out Orion’s Belt, the three stars which for centuries have been a tool for celestial navigation and a visual anchor for amateur astronomers.
“You are going to witness the greatest show on earth,” boat captain Chris Crolley told his 33 passengers as he piloted the ferry Caretta through the darkness from the South Carolina mainland to this largest and most popular of the four main islands in Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge.
Onshore, the visitors spread out and pick their way along the beach by flashlight, stepping around some of the hundreds of sun-bleached, skeleton-like remains of cedar and oak and pine that stretch for three miles along the northeast end of the island. At one time, this whole area was a dense forest, but over the decades, powerful storms and rising sea levels have eaten away at the edges of the island and ravaged its population of trees.
Every now and then, one of us stoops to pluck a seashell or a sand dollar or some other curiosity of nature from the beach as the pre-dawn surf rolls onto the shore. Meanwhile, out there in the dark, 1,000 American alligators hunker down in the island’s swamps. Other creatures, too—black fox, bobcats, deer, cottonmouths, nearly 300 species of birds—have found sanctuary here, and when visitors to Bulls Island spy one of them, it is a special, thrilling moment indeed.
Several years ago, on my first visit to Bulls Island, I was alone walking a trail between Mills and Summerhouse roads when I spotted a large alligator (I can state with complete confidence that he was no shorter than 10 feet in length) sunning himself on the banks of Upper Summerhouse Pond. I had seen these animals on numerous occasions at places other than Bulls Island, but there was something about the wildness of this place, the stillness of the morning and the fact that we were there alone together that made the encounter something I will always remember.
And now, back here on the island once again for a sunrise stroll, the eastern sky is gradually stripping away the darkness. Gnats and mosquitoes bounce off my headlamp. A wave breaks and washes over the tops of my boots. Finally, the sun peeks over the horizon and sheds light on yet another day here at one of the last truly wild places in South Carolina.
Had it not been for New York broker Gayer Dominick, there is no telling what would have become of Bulls Island. A one-time director of Bank of America and Shell Oil Company, he purchased the island in 1925 so that he could have his own private hunting preserve.
He held on to the property for more than a decade and then in 1936 transferred ownership of the island to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. That agency, in turn, added the island to Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge, established four years earlier as a sanctuary for migratory birds. Today, the refuge comprises more than 66,000 acres—nearly half of it a Class I wilderness area—and stretches for 22 miles along the coast between Georgetown and Charleston.
Bulls Island remains the most visited of the four islands. A ferry from the mainland operates several days a week most of the year, and a network of trails and roads provides ample opportunities for hikers and birdwatchers to explore the island.
From the dock, visitors can embark on a nearly six-mile hike that will take them to Boneyard Beach, while a longer eight-mile trek will allow for additional sights and experiences. But either path will doubtlessly yield encounters with plants and animals they would be hard-pressed to find on the mainland.
There are at least two designated wildlife viewing platforms on the island, one overlooking Upper Summerhouse Pond—a 65-acre body of water that is one of 10 impoundments on the island—and a second one on Jacks Creek, just about a half-mile from the remains of an old fort that dates back to the 17th century when pirates plied their dark trade along the coast.
While camping is not allowed, a limited number of people each month are permitted to stay overnight on the island. For a fee that includes transportation, lodging and meals, they spend two nights at Dominick House—built by and named after Gayer Dominick, of course—and are led by a registered guide on several hikes over a period of three days. The opportunity to stay on Bulls Island is a rare one and reservations fill quickly, often up to a year in advance.
Two other main islands in the refuge, Raccoon Key and Cape Island, are seldom visited, although the latter is a significant nesting ground for loggerhead sea turtles, and wildlife biologists make numerous trips there during nesting season when mother turtles lumber ashore to lay their eggs. In fact, the refuge as a whole sees more nesting loggerheads than anywhere else along the coast, besides Florida.
The fourth island in the refuge is Lighthouse Island, the site of two decommissioned lighthouses that for decades helped alert ships to the area’s shallow, treacherous waters. The first lighthouse was built in 1827 but, standing at just 65 feet, it proved to be less than effective, and shipwrecks that had plagued the area for decades continued unabated.
A second lighthouse was constructed in the mid-1850s and stood nearly 100 feet higher than the first. Equipped with a massive Fresnel lens, the light could be seen nearly 20 miles away and subsequently, the number of shipwrecks in the area steeply declined.
To service the lighthouse, employees and their families lived on the island. It was, by all indications, a solitary existence, the only link to the mainland being a ferry that adults used to transport supplies and for children to attend school. As the years passed and ship navigation systems became more sophisticated, the need for lighthouses eventually declined, and the one on Lighthouse Island shone for the last time in the summer of 1947.
Thomas W. Graham III, a lifelong resident of McClellanville, was just a child at the time, but he still remembers his father walking with him to the end of a road in their town and pointing to the light eight miles offshore.
The elder Graham owned a hardware store in town and was close friends with most, if not all, of the people who worked on Lighthouse Island. The storekeeper knew he was witnessing the end of an era, something that had been so important to him and to many others over the years, and he wanted his son to be a part of the moment.
“There was just this tiny light on the horizon,” Graham, 76, told me on an April 2018 trip to Lighthouse Island. “My dad said, ‘I want you to see this because that light is going to be turned off forever.’”
These days, Graham accompanies visitors to Lighthouse Island during trips staged four times each year. Wearing calf-high, brown rubber boots, a fawn-colored shirt and a ball cap that reads “Jamaica ’62,” the retired expert on historic preservation answers questions about the lighthouse during the hour-long ferry ride from McClellanville to the island.
Once the boat leaves the mainland, it makes its way along Clubhouse Creek until it reaches Muddy Bay. We see bottlenose dolphins and brown pelicans, blue herons and dozens of white great egrets, patiently standing out there among the spartina grass looking for fish.
As we move forward, Oyster Bay is on our right and Horsehead Island is on our left. Capt. William Christensen, who is piloting the craft, notes that Muddy Bay is a notoriously low body of water that is impossible to navigate during low tide.
When we leave the bay altogether and turn into the Romain River, Lighthouse Island is on our right, and it is not long until the two lighthouses come into view.
There is no boat dock on the island and so we walk down a ramp and through several yards of soft pluff mud. We had been warned earlier in the day during a briefing at Sewee Visitor and Environmental Education Center in Awendaw that we should avoid wearing sandals because they could easily become stuck in the mud, leaving a visitor barefoot for the duration of the trip.
Ranger Patricia Midgett also warns us to beware of venomous snakes, including water moccasins. “Stay on the path,” she says. “We are in the wilderness.”
Graham leads many in the group up a path to the tallest lighthouse. There are, he tells us, about 250,000 bricks in the tower and 212 steps, although the lower section is missing and it is no longer possible to climb to the top of the structure.
From outside, we see where vandals had years ago broken windows at the top of the lighthouse and we can see, too, how the 154-foot structure leans slightly to the west. And on the inside, we see how that west wall, at one time pure white, has been stained reddish-brown after decades of rain blowing in and draining residue from the rusting infrastructure down the inside of the wall.
And the big Fresnel lens that shone brightly for so many years and guided sailors through the area, helping them to get home safely to their families and friends?
Vandals destroyed that, too.
The morning sun is well clear of the horizon now and those of us who traveled to Bulls Island to witness the sunrise head back to the ferry that brought us here. We cast one last look at the beach and its strange, forlorn landscape of fallen maritime trees, and at the relentless pounding of the waves, great and small, upon the shore—a reminder of constant change.
Robert S. Young, an expert in shorelines at Western Carolina University, told me some months earlier that all that wave action, along with rising sea levels, is actually transforming the geography of the area.
“It is really amazing how dynamic those small ribbons of barrier islands are,” says Young, director of the university’s Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines. He notes that the change is best seen by watching a time-lapse sequence of satellite photographs of the area taken between 1984 and 2016.
“You will see some of those barrier islands completely disappear,” he says, referring to numerous small islands that populate the refuge along with its four main islands. “But even though you see some places where barrier islands collapse and disappear, new ones form, just in a different spot and maybe a little bit closer landward.”
Unlike other locations in the state where eroded beaches have been replenished with millions of cubic yards of sand, beaches and the smaller barrier islands in the refuge are left to the whims of nature. Experts estimate that, throughout the refuge, as much as 25 feet of shoreline are lost each year.
“I think we need these last remaining natural areas, where humans are not trying to interfere with the system directly, to remind us of how natural barrier islands and the marshes behind them function,” Young says, adding that he wishes all Americans had the opportunity to appreciate the importance of the Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge.
“I mean, there just aren’t many places like that left,” he says. “We are lucky to have it.”
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Get There
For more information on Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge, call the headquarters office at (843) 928-3264, or visit fws.gov/refuge/Cape_Romain and facebook.com/caperomain.
The Sewee Visitor Center, located at 5821 Highway 17 North in Awendaw, is open Wednesday–Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. except on major holidays. For more information, call (843) 928-3368 or visit fws.gov/refuge/sewee_center.
The ferry to Bulls Island leaves from Garris Landing at 498 Bulls Island Road, near Awendaw. During the winter, the ferry operates on Saturdays only, leaving at 10 a.m. and returning at 3 p.m. The summer schedule is more robust, with regularly scheduled trips on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Departures are at 9 a.m. and noon, with returns at noon and 4 p.m.
Tickets are $40 for adults and $20 for children between the ages of 2 and 12. For more information, contact Coastal Expeditions at (843) 884-7684 or visit their website at coastalexpeditions.com.