Congaree

Congaree National Park, formerly Congaree Swamp National Monument, is a swamp in South Carolina. It was, as you'd expect, hot, humid, and buggy. As you might also expect, it was not very crowded, and rather quiet.

I hiked the Weston Lake Loop Trail. Had I been responsible for naming it, I would have called it the Trail of Spidery Death. Congaree is not a place for arachnophobes! There are spiders everywhere, large and small. And there are magnificent orb webs everywhere, often stretching for four feet across the trail path at various heights. And sometimes you don't see them until you walk into them.

I'm not afraid of spiders. I'm probably as unfazed as it gets for a typical civilian non-entomologist when it comes to creepy crawlers, but I was pretty wigged out after about an hour of brushing webs and spiders off my arms and face and wondering how many of the damn buggers might still be crawling around on me where I can't see 'em.

Last Thanksgiving, in a swamp in Tampa, we saw a bunch of these weird knobby things growing out of the ground and had no idea what they were. At Congaree, I learned that they are the "knees" of the Bald Cypress tree. They are actually parts of the root systems of the parent trees. Weird.

Anyway, here are some more spiders for your viewing pleasure.