Information
Introduction
SCGreatOutdoors.com is an extensive reference site showing over three hundred parks and recreation areas in South Carolina. Also included are fourteen bicycling routes and two long-distance trails.
If you are new to this state, you can quickly locate nearby parks by clicking on the county you live in or the counties around it. If you have lived here for a while, you may have already seen some of the more well known sights. By looking under different counties and special interests, you can find many new and interesting places to go and things to do. If you do not live in South Carolina but will be visiting, you can use this guide to decide where you would like to go and what to see.
See What's New to find recent additions and changes to this web site, or get the latest news here.
Definitions
- Developed campground
- a group of campsites equipped with electricity and water, with restrooms and showers available
- Community building or Meeting facility
- a building or pavilion that can be rented for large group functions
- Park pond or Park lake
- a pond or lake that is entirely within the park
- Primitive campground
- a designated area for tent camping, or a set of campsites without all of the facilities listed in Developed campground
- Secondary road
- a paved road maintained by the South Carolina Department of Transportation that is not designated as an interstate highway, US highway, or state highway
Maps
At the top of each county page, you will see a map showing the county boundaries, with red markers for the parks and recreation areas. Click on the red marker to see the name of the park, which you can click on for more information about it.
Updates and changes
As with any web site of this type, all of the information is subject to change. Altho I make much effort to update these pages as soon as I find out about changes, I cannot assume any liability for errors. Like any normal human, I do make mistakes sometimes!
Hours of operation
Most of the larger recreation areas have posted hours in which they are open to the public. These hours are, of course, subject to change. Most of the smaller parks either have no posted hours, or are simply open during daylight hours.
Fees
Many of the larger recreation areas charge admission fees, which change from time to time, while the smaller parks are almost always free to visit.
Dogs
© SCGreatOutdoors
Many of the parks are recreation areas allow visitors to bring dogs along. In almost all cases, dogs are required to remain leashed at all times. One notable exception is that a few parks have special fenced off-leash dog areas, where dogs may be allowed to roam free.
The following places offer off-leash dog areas:
Also, note that many of South Carolina's oceanfront communities have ordinances regarding dogs on the beach. For example, the city of Folly Beach does not allow dogs to be on the beach from 10:00a to 6:00p during the months of May to September.
Secondary road numbers
The South Carolina Department of Transportation assigns numbers to all secondary roads that they maintain. They are in the format S-[County number]-[Road number]. You can see these numbers on the small black signs located above the stop signs.
History of SCGreatOutdoors.com
Growing up in the Columbia area, I heard many complaints about the lack of local recreation. Compared to the mountains of the upstate, or to the lowcountry with its beaches, the midlands just seemed pretty dull to a lot of people. This was odd to me, because I was discovering new and interesting places all the time. People were saying that there was nothing interesting to do in Columbia, but these same people never took advantage of the opportunities that were available.
Sometime in the late 1990s, I decided to draw up a list of outdoor parks and recreation areas in the five or six counties around Columbia. After compiling the list in a word processor, I thought I might print up some little pamphlets or booklets to let people know what was available. It was intended mainly for people who had lived here for a while and were getting bored, but I also thought that new residents and visitors might benefit from it.
About this time, companies such as CompuServe and GeoCities were starting to offer space where somebody like me could quickly build and publish a small web site for little of no cost. Seeing the opportunity here, I quickly learned HTML and signed up for my own home page. The printed booklets never did turn out to be very popular, so I decided to stick with web publishing. Within a few years, I had greatly enlarged the web site, now covering the entire midlands swath of the state from Fort Mill to North Augusta! Looking for a name that people would remember, I settled on “Trail-O-Dex”, since I figured nobody else would be using a name like that, and I ended up registering the URL “www.trail-o-dex.info”.
Early in 2000, just when I thought I had the South Carolina Midlands area completely covered, I got a job in the Charleston area and moved down! Now, I had an enormous new area to cover, so I began expanding the web site even further. Some day, I had hoped to cover the entire state.
This was not to be, however, at least not right away. Only nine months after moving to Charleston, I got a job offer with a company in southern Maryland. From my new location, there was no way for me to maintain the web site, so I contacted SCIway and asked if they had any ideas. They offered to take over the web site and incorporate it into “www.sciway.net”.
About five years later, I ended up moving back to the Charleston area, so I again contacted SCIway to see what they had done with my web site and what their plans were for it. It turns out they had done very little, but they were still interested in it. Rather than yanking it back away from them, I decided to join the SCIway team and bring the web pages back up to date.
We ended up renaming the site to “www.scgreatoutdoors.com”, and it now has recreational listings for almost every county in South Carolina. Altho it covers the entire state, most of the listings are concentrated in the lowcountry and the midlands. Over the next few years, I hope to make more trips to the upstate to add information about that area.
Superlatives
- Largest:
- Smallest:
- Busiest:
- Most variety of scenery:
- Most unusual natural scenery:
- Most un-fulfilled potential:
- Most unknown:
Comments and suggestions
Your comments and suggestions are always welcome! I am continually trying to improve this web site, so your input is important. E-mail me at mike@sciway.net.
External links:
American Bird Center: http://www.americanbirdcenter.com/
Berkeley County's Blueways: http://www.berkeleyblueways.com/
South Carolina's State Trails Program: http://www.sctrails.net/
Web site maintained by Mike Adams, mike@sciway.net. [010-07-04]
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SCIWAY
