When you work the visitor center’s information desk on a slow day, you can strike up conversations with walk-ins. Visitors will often tell you interesting things about themselves. And once in a while they will positively astound you.
This week’s quiz focuses on troubled species. Answers are at the end. If we catch you peeking, we’ll make you write “Encountering a four-meter Crocodylus acutus can cause severe de-puckering of the anal sphincter” 100 times on the whiteboard.
In an action unusual for its time, timber tycoon and early conservationist Francis Beidler put his vast holdings of South Carolina forestland in timber reserve status in the early 1900s. Six decades later, Congaree Swamp National Monument, now Congaree National Park, was created from the remnants. The park celebrates its 32nd birthday today, October 18.
You’ll love what they see at the national park entrance gates on Saturday, September 27. It’s the 15th annual National Public Lands Day, and all parks will be waiving their admission fees. It’d be nice if you volunteered to help with the site restoration and cleanup efforts planned for that day.
The Land and Water Conservation Fund was signed into law on September 3, 1964, took effect on January 1, 1965, and has since provided $4 billion to buy national park land and easements. That’s not nearly enough. The National Park Service’s acquisitions backlog has grown to $1.9 billion, and it’s getting bigger every year.
The Congaree River is flooding again, and as far as Congaree National Park is concerned, that’s a good thing. Periodic flooding is the very lifeblood of the extraordinary river bottom forest that the park preserves.
Do you know where the national parks are located? This little quiz will test the accuracy of your National Park System “mental map.” The answers are at the end. No peeking!
Though a veritable youngster in the national park realm, Congaree National Park is a vegetative museum, harboring some of the eastern United States' tallest trees in what's said to be the largest old-growth bottomland hardwood forest in the country.