Field Trip! Day 1

Last weekend (August 15-16) was a two-day field excursion for the incoming USC Geography Department's graduate student cohort, organized and hosted by our wonderful Director of Graduate Studies, Caroline Nagel, as well as some of our seasoned graduate student colleagues. It was a whirlwind trip and we got to see a lot of really neat sites. I don't know of any other graduate program that offers something like this for their new students (share if yours did!) so it only further solidified my sentiment of this being an awesome program with dedicated faculty and students, and the right place for me! And if anyone loves a good field trip, it's a geographer!
Our first stop was a historic tour led by Mr. James Quint of the Historical Columbia Foundation of the geography of racial segregation in Columbia during the Jim Crow era. We visited dozens of sites around downtown Columbia and learned about the prominent Mann-Simmons family, whose matriarch was a slave in Charleston who bought her freedom and lived in Columbia before the Emancipation Proclamation. Her descendants lived on this site until the 1970s. The site is now a museum and historic landmark.

We also visited Artillery Hill, which was so named for the confederate artillery factory there, which is down the street from the present-day governor's mansion, itself a historic building which used to be the officer barracks of a military school. We saw the home of photographer Richard Samuel Roberts as well as a the "tourist home" next door, which was a home that was operated as a sort of bed & breakfast/ safe house and advertised as such in the black community so that people of color had a safe place to stay at while traveling through Columbia during the Jim Crow era.

Self portrait of Richard Samuel Roberts, circa-1930 from
 http://www.historiccolumbia.org/tour-locations?neighborhood=Arsenal%20Hill
Image courtesy South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina

Another interesting stop on the tour was the Big Apple Dance Hall, which was originally a synagogue (Columbia has a historic Jewish community) which was sold in 1936 and turned into a music and dance hall where the dance which would be known as the "Big Apple" was born.

The Big Apple 

From downtown Columbia myself and 6 colleagues, piled into the 15-passenger van which was not exactly road-worthy, which Caroline drove the best she could to the Congaree National Park, about 20 miles SE of Columbia. The Congaree is largely swampland, so we'd been warned to be prepared for the heat and the mosquitoes, neither of which ended up being as bad as anticipated.

Mosquito Meter at the Congaree Visitor's Center

I'd done some reading prior to the trip about the park and learned that it is "the largest intact expanse of old growth bottomland hardwood forest remaining in the southeastern United States"(1) and home to some state and national Champion Trees. Champion trees are simply put, giant trees. There is a formula for determining if a tree is a "champion" which measures its height, trunk circumference, and the average crown or canopy spread. The reason there are so many champion trees in Congaree (many thought to be "undiscovered") is due to the area not being logged due to its inaccessibility, combined with the moisture and nutrients supplied by the flooding of the Congaree.

Water gauge on Cedar Creek

Chris giving us an intro to the park

We were really lucky to get a mini-tour of the park from Geography Ph.D. candidate, Chris Kaase, who has been studying the fluvial sediment of the Congaree for the past 5-some years and knows the park intimately. We learned about the seasonal flooding of the park and how water is retained in a complex system of slews, guts, and lakes. We also learned about some of the flora and fauna of the park. The bald cypress tree, Taxodium distichum, is especially interesting with its "knees" that stick-up out of the mud like little posts. These are thought to provide support and stabilization for the tree, though their exact purpose remains unknown.

 Bald cedar "knees"

Luckily we did not come across any of the three venomous snakes native to the swamp, the copperhead (Agkistrodon contortrix) cottonmouth (Agkistrodon piscivorus), and the timber rattle snake (Crotalus horridus atricaudatus). Chris said he regularly sees cottonmouths and although he's never been bit, he keeps a venom kit in his pack as a precaution. Apparently feral pigs are a big problem in the park. They damage saplings and other fauna while rooting-up the forest floor looking for grubs and roots and reproduce so quickly that the population has become invasive and a nuisance, though the park service isn't doing anything to quell the situation at the moment. I hope to return to the park and explore via the creeks and river on a kayak. If I'm lucky, maybe I'll see some river otters! That would be a dream come true.

Sean gazing at a mighty cedar

Me at the bridge over Cedar Creek

End of the trail at Wise Lake

Cute little fungi

Whitish fishing spider (Dolomedes albineus) on the boardwalk - looked like a dead leaf until we looked closer!

Cooper's Country Store on Highway 521

A pit-stop on the way to our final destination of day-1 was unplanned but certainly interesting. It was the historic Cooper's Country Store, which was built as a grocery/gas station in 1937 by Theron Burrows. The store was taken over by his son-in-law upon his death in 1978 and renamed the Cooper's Country Store, which still provides much of the same products and services it did almost 80 years ago! It certainly had a rustic feel inside, like stepping back in time. The selection of pig parts was a bit smelly and I couldn't tell if the vintage can of possum meat by the cash register was a joke or not. One of my colleagues, Sean, treated me to a local Blenheim ginger ale which was spicy and delicious!

 Just as evening rolled around we arrived at the Belle W. Baruch Institute for Marine & Coastal Sciences outside of Georgetown, SC, where we'd be staying the night. It's a research/educational complex co-owned by USC. Being in the pines combined with the smell of bug spray and sleeping on a bunk-bed really brought me back to nights spent on Mt. Lemmon at Camp Whispering Pines when I was a Girlscout back in the early 90s.

We had two cabins which were actually pretty comfortable. Can't beat air conditioning and toilets/showers! Some of the returning Geography graduate students came early to the institute and had made us tacos and had a cooler stocked full of a selection of delicious local beers - quite a nice way to end our busy day! (Thanks Alex, Erika, Aashka & Christy!)

Ol' Faithful a.k.a The Van that Almost Killed Us All

Pond at the Institute

Good beer

We chatted over dinner about the Department and the state of higher education in general, but once we'd all had a few of the local brewskies things weren't so serious and we had a some fun playing a few icebreaker games, one of which involved a rubber chicken.

More shenanigans and excursions awaited us on Day 2.  Did I see a gator!?? Was there a shark attack?!! Check back soon for all the excitement of  "Field Trip! Day 2" --- COMING SOON!!!

 -AMS