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Park Video Tour
Current Weather Conditions on Lake Marion at Santee State Park
Santee State Park offers cabins, camping, biking, hiking, boating and fishing in the heart of one of the nation’s best-known outdoors destinations – Santee Cooper Country.
The park sits along Lake Marion, one of the two lakes (the other’s Moultrie) that gave birth to America’s inland striped bass fishery. Together, the lakes cover more than 170,000 acres and now also are known for their abundant populations of huge catfish.
The park’s rondette cabins, including 10 on piers over the lake, have been hosting outdoorsmen and families for generations. A community meeting building, with its large, screened-in grilling facility, also attracts groups.
Out in the lake across from the park is Lake Marion’s flooded cypress forest. Pontoon boat tours into the lake’s swampy headwaters are based out of the park’s marina/park store.
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 Santee |
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Table Rock Mountain provides a towering backdrop for an upcountry retreat at the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Table Rock State Park features two lakes, a campground, mountain cabins, meeting facilities and its historic, renovated lodge.
The park has been one of South Carolina’s most popular since it was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s. Many of its structures are now on the National Register of Historic Places.
Table Rock was home to one of the state’s first formal nature education programs and now serves as a trailhead for the 80-mile long Foothills Trail through the wilderness along the Blue Ridge Escarpment. Trails through the forested park also include one that leads to the top of Table Rock Mountain itself.
The park also hosts a visitors center near the main gate along S.C. 11, the Cherokee Foothills National Scenic Highway.
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 Pickens |
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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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Check Lake Levels
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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Park Video Tour
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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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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Military & Law Enforcement Golf Discount
What would you call a state park that offers 18 holes of lakeside championship golf, tennis, skeet shooting and archery, a swimming pool for lodge guests, 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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NOTICE TO CABIN GUESTS
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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