2026 03 07 - National Park, Congaree - Columbia SC

Sign

One of the fewer National Parks on the eastern coast. 'Old growth' trees. It is about 30 miles from the town of Columbia SC.

We had one day left to kill between working and spending a few days on the ocean coast. This fit into our timeline.

The park is free, so we still haven't used our parks pass.

It was unusually warm for this time of years so the parking lot was filling up fast. We could have gotten here earlier but we have all day.

There are lots of paths but the main one is mostly a raised boardwalk. I don't remember any steps, but that would be good to know before you go if it makes a difference. There is some incline / decline from the main building to most of the trails. But once you are at river level the path is mostly level.

Right now about half the boardwalk is under construction so it is either out and back or take one of the dirt paths. We took the dirt path back after we reached the river.

Wildlife? Something like 7 turtles, 1 squirrel and 1 bird. Not much. So we mostly stopped and looked at all the little info signs.

This area mostly exists because it was too hard to get the trees cut down and moved out.

Here we walked about an hour and a half.

Then we went back to our hotel to eat, and headed to the zoo in the afternoon where we walked another couple of hours. I haven't been writing up zoo's and festivals because the pace of the walk is so much slower.

Looking up, plus the path.