The South Carolina coast is dominated by three different beach draws: Myrtle Beach to the north, the Charleston area beaches, and Hilton Head Island near the Georgia border. Myrtle Beach is the hottest beach in the Carolinas, and the recreational activities here continue to explode.

I have fond memories of my early childhood days exploring Myrtle Beach. This was the first oceanic beach that I ever saw - what a gigantic sand box with water to splash around in, waves to ride, and ghost crabs to chase at night. We rented a one-story wooden house (the norm then), and the beach was the main (and almost the only) attraction at the time, which was okay with me. The waves were small and safe for kids learning to body surf. The sand was fine and hard-packed so I drove our old Peugeot right on the beach (before I could legally obtain a driver's license); beach driving was later banned as Myrtle Beach expanded into a major resort area. The tap water was undrinkable unless it was so ice cold that your taste buds were immediately frozen on contact. We brought canisters of fresh water from our home in Charlotte, but we invariably ran out before the week was up. Upon returning for the first time to Myrtle Beach in the 1980s, several decades later, I was stunned by all of the changes-high-rise buildings lining the beach, traffic and people everywhere, and drinkable water. It is hard to believe that this area has mushroomed to its present size and status; there are daily, direct flights from Washington, D.C. to Myrtle Beach.

Myrtle Beach is a part of the Grand Strand of South Carolina, which is actually one long, "grand" beach, extending for over 60 miles. At the south end of the strand are the popular, but generally less populated beaches of Huntington Beach State Park and Litchfield Beach. Over 12 million people visit the Myrtle Beach area annually, which makes it the second largest draw on the East Coast, only exceeded by Disney World in Orlando, Florida. A mild climate, golf, and live theatre have made
Myrtle Beach a year-round resort destination.

Partying and dancing have always been part of the Myrtle Beach scene as this is where shag dancing originated. There are shag dancing competitions, where contestants move to the beat of classic beach music like "Double Shot of My Baby's Love." But now this beach bar nightlife is being rivaled, if not upstaged, by country music and live performances by some of the top country stars. Myrtle Beach is predicted to overcome Nashville and Branson in a few years as the country music center of America, making it the Novelty Beach in the Southeast. Can you imagine a dinner theater where knights joust on horseback and sword fight near your table? This is one of the many nightlife attractions.

The Myrtle Beach area now boasts of more than 80 golf courses, making it the top golf destination in the United States and probably the world. It is now sometimes called the "Golf Coast," not to be confused with the "Gold Coast," as the golf packages make for an affordable vacation. There are more than 50,000 rooms and 1,500 restaurants to accommodate visitors, and many of the dining spots feature all-you-can-eat buffets, which offer more quantity than quality. The Outlet Park with 125 stores claims to be the largest outlet shopping center on the East Coast, surpassing Rehoboth Beach in Delaware. All of this goes along with Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum in Myrtle Beach. I certainly find all of this hard to believe when I compare my childhood memories to what has become an incredible man-made fantasyland.

The beaches are highly developed and often crowded, but the water is very swimmable as wave action is usually subdued and the temperature quite warm and soothing. The beaches are hard packed and fairly flat, making them great for walking or jogging. This fine-grained sand also makes for good sand castles as I discovered early on during my first exploits of Myrtle Beach.

Beach erosion has been a recurring problem, and I have stayed at North Myrtle Beach when there was no beach at high tide; the waves were kissing the sand dunes during non-storm, spring high tides. Beach nourishment projects are periodically implemented to make up for the gradual loss of the sand so that beach width varies greatly along the length of the Grand Strand as well as through time.

While hotels and high-rise condos dominate the skyline and shoreline of Myrtle Beach, the southern strand is the less developed, quieter companion. Huntington Beach State Park is a 2,500-acre park with a three-mile stretch of undeveloped beach. This beach is wide and clean with nearly white sand, and is my personal favorite along the South Carolina coast. This is the only beach in America that has a castle; this unfinished, 40-room mansion was built in the 1930s and is open for tours. I believe that the South Carolina State Parks people ought to fix up this Moorish-style castle for guests; I am sure it would be a hit.

A little further south is Litchfield Beach, which is a small, quiet community. Their claim to fame is having the clearest water on the Carolina coast. Certainly the water tends to get murkier as you go south because the tides become stronger, the inlets more numerous, and the salt marshes larger in areal extent. All of this combines to make the water less clear (it can still be quite clean), but people prefer to see their feet. It is for this reason that South Carolina beaches do not claim top spots in my annual Best Beaches ratings, even though Hilton Head and Kiawah are two of the top resort beaches in the country.

Charleston exudes Old South charm, and is one of the most highly rated and popular tourist destinations in the country. The historic downtown area is a great place to walk and admire the majestic houses and old churches with high steeples, especially at the south end of town in the battery. On summer nights the air is pungent with the scent of sweet magnolia blossoms carried on the gentle sea breezes. I love to inhale this scent. The friendly folks say that the high humidity is good for your complexion; it surely makes me want to take a dip in the ocean to cool down.

Charleston is known for its "low-country cooking," with the chefs drawing from the bountiful fish and shellfish that populate this watery region. You will need a map to find your way around by car as you will shortly discover that Charleston is built on a peninsula of land, bounded by the Santee and Cooper Rivers. A short boat ride away is Fort Sumter, where the first shots of the Civil War were fired in 1861. Fortunately, this historic city was spared the destruction and mayhem that Atlanta and other Southern cities experienced in General Sherman's infamous "march to the sea." This grand old city has also survived major earthquakes and hurricanes. I traveled to Charleston just a few days after Hurricane Hugo (a category 4 storm) made landfall in the area, putting out all of the city lights. This grand city recovered quickly from yet another natural disaster. The summers are hot and humid, and I attribute the advent of air conditioning as the primary reason the South has risen again.

The area beaches are good but variable in what they offer. Sullivan's Island and Isle of Palms are mostly residential properties available for weekly rental. The Wild Dunes Resort on Isle of Palms is an upscale, gated community which features houses with large screened-in porches. Being a tennis buff, I enjoyed playing on their highly rated clay courts. The water is a bit murky throughout the region, but the waves are small and the beach is gradually sloping so that it is a very safe area to swim. Stay away from the inlets because of the swift currents when the tide changes.

The lighthouse at the south end of Sullivan's Island is now the entrance marker to Charleston Harbor, but in earlier times the Morris Island Lighthouse served this purpose. Today, the Morris Island Lighthouse is standing over a thousand feet offshore in the Atlantic Ocean, a testament to the rapid erosion caused by building the Charleston Harbor jetties. Remarkably, the lighthouse withstood Hurricane Hugo, but this privately owned lighthouse is tilting a tad and only reachable by boat.

The barrier islands along the South Carolina coast from this point south are short and stubby in comparison to the long, skinny islands of North Carolina's Outer Banks. The characteristic "drumstick" shape of the islands indicates that the large tides (actually strong tidal currents) play a dominant role in their overall stability and evolution. The inlets between each island are relatively deep and stable; major storms like Hurricane Hugo can generate large storm surges and cause sand overwashing of the island, but new inlets rarely cut through the islands (as occurs frequently along their small tide counterparts in North Carolina). The inlet position can migrate somewhat with the growth of sand spits, but the channels stay within certain bounds and never close. By comparison, there have been scores of historic inlets along the Outer Banks of North Carolina, but only a handful are open today. Also, inlets along wave-controlled barrier beaches tend to migrate downdrift and can cause considerable problems for developments (e.g., the Shell Island Resort on Wrightsville Beach, N.C. is presently vulnerable to southward inlet migration, which may cause the demise of this $25 million, high-rise building within the year).

To the south of Charleston are Folly Island and Kiawah Island - a real contrast in development styles. Folly was developed early on, reached its zenith during the Big Band era of the 1940s, and then went into decline. As the beach continued to erode, residents threw everything but the kitchen sink onto the beach in attempts to stop the landward marching of the sea. The beach was a virtual battlefield and a real mess; they had literally killed the goose that laid the golden egg. Hurricane Hugo caused massive destruction of the beachfront houses and coastal defenses, and the removal of this old and poorly constructed development in combination with the influx of insurance money actually caused its revival. One real loss was the Atlantic House Restaurant, which served some of the best shrimp creole that I have ever had. Prior to the storm, the restaurant stood completely in the water at normal high tide so that even a "Baby Hugo" could have knocked it down.

Kiawah Island is a totally planned development, and a visit to this delightful island getaway will convince you of the value of this approach. The emphasis was "building with nature" rather than bulldozing everything aside as has been shamelessly done elsewhere along the coast. The houses were built to blend with the vegetation; even roads veer around big trees in order to save them. Originally developed by sheiks from Kuwait in the 1970s, the island has since changed hands, but fortunately the development concept has remained. Golf is taken seriously here, and the ocean course has baffled many experts with its windy, unforgiving condi-tions. The tennis program at Kiawah is also highly rated.

Kiawah has several marine biologists on staff to lead interpretative tours of the fauna and flora of the island. Considerable tracts of land have been left as natural areas, particularly on the bayside, and Kiawah is the home to over 150 species of birds and 50 different kinds of mammals and reptiles. The best way to see the island is by bicycle. The sand is so hard packed that you can ride a mountain bicycle on the beach. The public beach is on the south end of the island, just after you cross the bridge onto the island. This is also where the marsh canoeing trips start. Other nature activities involve ocean seining trips.

One of my favorite activities is a walk down to the south tip of Kiawah - a low, duneless area that attracts countless birds for resting and feeding on the flats. Sometimes this sand spit grows to be several miles long, making the bounding inlet (Captain Sam's Inlet) meander for a long distance before finding its way to the sea. When the spit is long, chances are that the downdrift (southward) island's beach is out of sand. Seabrook Island receives a new supply of sand each time a storm or, more recently, people cut through this long, thin sliver of sand, causing the inlet to relocate further northward and allowing a big slug of sand to move onto Seabrook's beach.

Hilton Head Island is the toast of the South Carolina coast and one of the most beautiful islands that I have ever had the pleasure to visit. The beach is 12 miles long, and Hilton Head is by far the largest island on the South Carolina coast. It is akin to the famed Sea Islands of the Georgia coast; the island core was formed over 100,000 years ago when sea level was higher than present. Between this high stand of sea level and today was the last Ice Age which caused glaciers to creep down as far south as northern New Jersey and dropped sea levels some 300 to 400 feet below their present levels. Most barrier islands were formed during the slowly rising sea level of the last 7,000 years, but ancestral Hilton Head already existed and this latest geologic event just plastered a new (beach) face onto its old shore.

Hilton Head Island's intrinsic beauty of huge live oak trees dripping with Spanish moss and a wide variety of lush subtropical vegetation was not ravaged by development. In fact, this is one of the most tastefully developed barrier islands in the country, owing to the vision of Charles Fraser. He established the rigorous zoning and architectural design of Sea Pines Plantation on the south end, which set the standard for island-wide development. I can remember meeting Fraser in the early 1980s, and he invited me to come down to Hilton Head for a weekend of yachting. Unfortunately, I lost his private number (and a real opportunity to socialize with one of the greats).

Hilton Head is one of the premier resort islands on the U.S. coasts. The Renaissance Festival at year's end - attracting movers and shakers, especially Democrats - is now held here. In recent years, President Clinton and family have attended this nearly week-long event. The golf courses and tennis courts are considered world-class. Actually, it was Arnold Palmer who put Hilton Head on the map when he won the first Heritage Golf Classic at the Sea Pines Plantation golf course. Since it was Palmer's first tournament victory after a long slump, it made national news. Timing is everything in life, but Charles Fraser had rightfully positioned this island resort for such acclaim.

The beaches on Hilton Head run the gamut from very good to less than desirable at the island tips. The best beaches are in the middle of the island, far from the inlets. The beaches are fairly flat and very expansive at low tide, which often exposes tidal pools for the kiddies. We stayed at Sea Pines Plantation because of the tennis and availability of a house rental on the beach. The rental people insisted that the beaches were good here, but I knew otherwise. The strong tidal currents carry the nutrient-rich broth of the bayside salt marshes into the ocean on a falling or ebbing tide. This makes the water so turbid that you cannot see your toes in a mere inch or two of water. The sand tends to be draped with mud so that the kids get really dirty when playing on the low-tide beach. Jellyfish were a problem (not the stinging type, mind you), but all the same a nuisance. So don't listen to the realtors who tend to fib a bit about the beach; stay away from the tips of the island where the water is the murkiest and the beaches less than sandy.

South Carolina Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism
1205 Pendleton Street, Edgar A. Brown Building
Columbia, SC 29201
(803) 734-0122

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