Beaches
Four state parks are oceanfront and provide access to the sandy beaches and rolling surf of the Atlantic Ocean.
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Hunting Island State Park
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They are renowned for the natural beauty of the South Carolina coast – salt marsh, maritime forests, tidal creeks, all teeming with wildlife – and for the amenities that allow visitors to enjoy this beauty, including:
When you camp in a natural setting like a state park, the animals in the park are part of the experience! Read this information on how to camp with animals around like raccoons!
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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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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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A sweeping Grand Strand beach, pristine and wide open. Sea-breeze camping and fishing from a jetty or in the surf. And some of the finest bird-watching on the East Coast.
That’s not all Huntington Beach State Park has to offer. There’s also Atalaya, the picturesque, Moorish-style winter home of Anna Hyatt and Archer Huntington, sculptress and philanthropist, respectively, who left the park and adjacent Brookgreen Gardens as their legacy.
Nature lovers also will enjoy the park’s Environmental Education Center and wide variety of programming, including the chance to see loggerhead turtles and other endangered plant and animal species up close. The park’s freshwater lake is a sure-fire place to see alligators and sometimes even a mink or two.
Art lovers, meanwhile, flock by the thousands to the prestigious, juried Atalaya Arts and Crafts Festival held in and around the castle each September.
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 Murrells Inlet |
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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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