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Barnwell State Park may be the best fishing hole in South Carolina that not many folks know about.
A traditional state park primarily serving the people of Barnwell County, Barnwell State Park offers camping and cabins, picnicking and playgrounds, and a community center long favored for meetings and reunions.
There’s also a nature trail that winds around a pair of nice-sized ponds that many locals know hold a good population of bream and bass, some of them surprisingly large.
Barnwell State Park is one of 16 state parks in South Carolina built by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression to provide jobs for the men who built them and recreational opportunities for the people who live nearby.
Such as great fishing. Guess the secret’s out!
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 Blackville |
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Natural beauty and great golf come together at Cheraw State Park.
An 18-hole championship course winds its way through the long-leaf pinelands of the traditional state park, a course that’s earned notice from the Aubudon Society for the way it’s managed to preserve and protect the habitat it shares with uncommon critters such as red-cockaded woodpeckers and fox squirrels.
The park in South Carolina’s northeast corner also boasts Lake Juniper, a 300-acre impoundment built by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression along with the park’s original cabins and picnic facilities.
A boardwalk along the lake helps visitors enjoy the scenic setting, and kayakers particularly enjoy silently scooting into the cypress wetlands at the lake’s edge.
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 Cheraw |
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Spot a loon or a rambling black bear. Fish for trout in a deep, clear mountain lake. Hike through the glorious spring bloom of rhododendrons.
And do it in South Carolina.
Devils Fork State Park provides the only public access to Lake Jocassee, a largely undeveloped 7,500-acre reservoir tucked deep into the Blue Ridge.
Devils Fork is easily reached from S.C. 11, the Cherokee Foothills National Scenic Highway. The park is popular with families, fishermen, scuba divers and boaters, who enjoy Jocassee’s uncrowded setting and spectacular scenery, such as waterfalls cascading into the lake off steep, wooded slopes.
Full campground amenities and modern villas also are highlights of the park. So are hiking and nature trails that provide the opportunity to appreciate sights ranging from rare Oconee bell spring flowers to the fall color show, while bald eagles and peregrine falcons patrol the mountain skies.
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 Salem |
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Out into the lake but not far from the city, Dreher Island State Recreation Area is a great place to get away from it all.
Only about 30 miles from downtown Columbia on the shores of big Lake Murray – one of the best-known largemouth and striped bass fishing destinations in the South –
the park consists of three islands linked to shore by a causeway and two bridges.
In addition to woodsy hiking trails and lots of places to fish from shore, Dreher Island offers picnicking, camping and lakeside villas.
A tackle shop and boat ramp also is available. The park has long been popular with recreational boaters and fishermen, and has been a launching spot for major national bass tournaments.
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 Prosperity |
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BOAT LANDING CLOSED NOTICE: The park boat landing at Edisto Beach State Park is currently closed for renovations. Contact the park office at (843) 869-2756, for the location of other public landings.
An oceanfront campground on a palmetto-lined beach famed for its shelling is just one highlight of Edisto Beach State Park.
Only an hour from Charleston, the park also offers another campground deep in the maritime forest full of live oaks and some of the state’s tallest palmetto trees, as well as a row of comfortable cabins nestled in the woods but with a front-row view of miles of pristine marshland.
Edisto Beach State Park also offers the state’s longest system of handicapped-friendly hiking and biking trails, including one leading to a mysterious, 4,000-year-old shell midden alongside a secluded bend on a tidal creek.
The park also has an environmental education center, a “green” building full of exhibits that highlight the natural history of Edisto Island and the surrounding ACE Basin, one of the nation’s largest preserved estuaries.
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 Edisto Island |
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Givhans Ferry State Park is the perfect place to take a float down the serene Edisto River, the longest free-flowing blackwater stream in North America.
On the dry side, Givhans Ferry boasts a well-regarded mountain bike trail, shady campgrounds and well-kept, rustic cabins that offer a peaceful stay in the rural Lowcountry woods and an easy drive to historic Charleston.
Built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the Great Depression, the park is part of the 56-mile long Edisto River Canoe and Kayak Trail, and is at the end of a popular 21-mile downstream paddle from Colleton State Park.
A natural retreat, Givhans Ferry State Park is also known for its limestone river bluff and sinkholes, some six to eight feet deep.
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 Ridgeville |
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What would you call a state park that offers 18 holes of lakeside championship golf, tennis, skeet shooting and archery, a swimming pool, full-service restaurant and meeting facilities and more than 70 lodge rooms?
That would be Hickory Knob State Resort Park.
The only full-service resort in the S.C. State Park Service, Hickory Knob rests on rolling, wooded shoreline alongside 70,000-acre Strom Thurmond Reservoir on the Savannah River: South Carolina’s “West Coast.”
The park’s amenities also include a boat ramp, campgrounds and one of the state’s most popular mountain biking trails. Serene and tucked away, location is another plus for this destination, with picturesque, historic small towns such as Abbeville and Greenwood nearby and Augusta and Anderson (and Clemson) just an easy drive away.
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 McCormick |
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Hunting Island is South Carolina’s single most popular state park, attracting more than a million human visitors a year.
Also attracted to the semi-tropical barrier island is an array of wildlife, ranging from loggerhead sea turtles to painted buntings, barracudas to sea horses, alligators, pelicans, dolphins and deer, raccoons, Eastern diamondback rattlesnakes and even the rare coral snake.
What they all enjoy is five miles of beach, thousands of acres of marsh, tidal creeks and maritime forest, a saltwater lagoon and ocean inlet. Amenities include a fishing pier and some of the state’s most desirable campsites and cabins.
Adding to the natural history of the big park is a piece of man-made history: South Carolina’s only publicly accessible historic lighthouse. Dating from the 1870s, the Hunting Island Lighthouse shoots 170 feet into the air, giving those who scale its heights a breathtaking view of the sweeping Lowcountry marshland and the Atlantic Ocean.
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 Hunting Island |
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With its stunning view of the Blue Ridge and woods full of rhododendrons, mountain laurel and wildflowers, Keowee-Toxaway State Natural Area is truly one of South Carolina’s pretty places.
History lovers also will appreciate the park’s museum, which tells the story of the Cherokee people who first lived here and their complex relationship with European settlers.
The park features a rental cabin with a porch overlooking Lake Keowee and a courtesy dock. Camping also is available.
For day use, there’s picnicking, shoreline fishing and hiking trails.
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 Sunset |
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A wide, open beach, fishing pier full of anglers and stories, campgrounds in the oceanfront woods, all in the middle of it all in Myrtle Beach.
Since 1935, a trip to the beach has meant a stay at Myrtle Beach State Park each year for hundreds of thousands of families from across the United States and Canada.
Located in the heart of the bustling Grand Strand, one of America’s most popular and diverse vacation destinations, Myrtle Beach State Park also is a natural retreat, home to one of South Carolina’s last stands of easily accessible, oceanfront maritime forest.
Programming and a nature center offer visitors the chance to learn more about dolphins, sea turtles and the abundant bird and plant life that grace the leafy park.
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 Myrtle Beach |
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