Congaree National Park

Congaree National Park is about 30 minutes from our apartment so we decided to go check it out on a free Saturday that we had.  Alden had a lot of fun completing their Junior Ranger program and we had fun hiking around a boardwalk trail.  We all enjoyed looking for lizards, giant spiders and skinks  along the trail and we found lots of them.  We even saw a spider catch a bug in it's web and start wrapping it in it's silk.  It was a very interesting walk and we were very grateful for the boardwalk because it was definitely very muddy.

The forest itself was very pretty and it was a cool place to go and learn a little history about the area.  The forest there floods multiple times every year and so it is almost always marshy but in some ways that has helped protect and preserve this hardwood forest because it made it harder to harvest the wood from that area.  I am glad that the forest was protected so that people like us can enjoy visiting it today.

Starting off on our hike through the forest area with my 3 boys.

Alden was a good little hiker and he was excited to have his own water backpack while we hiked.

There was a huge variety of different sized trees in the forest.  There were some that were huge around and others that were rather narrow.

This was one of our first lizard finds.

Can you see the spider in the picture?

Here is another different kind of lizard that we found.

Drew and I kept stopping to look at more giant spider webs in the trees.

Drew pointing out the spider web to Alden.

Can you see what animal we found here?  It is a frog.

We did a little bit of exploring off of the boardwalk but there were a lot of overgrown plants and tons of insects and bugs that we were not properly attired to deal with.

Anders loved looking at everything from his seat on Daddy's back.  Here is another lizard we found.

After we finished the main hike around the boardwalk we let Anders out and he was excited to walk a little and carry the big water bottle on the way to the car.  We had a fun and memorable time there and we are really glad that we took the time to go.