Why I Like It

ON HORSESHOE CREEK NEAR THE ASHEPOO RIVER IN COLLETON COUNTY, SOUTH CAROLINA.
April 27, 2008

Dan Huntley, 54, of York, S.C., who is a food book author and columnist for The Charlotte Observer. "I've paddled in the Everglades, Louisiana's Atchafalaya Swamp Basin and Florida's Apalachicola River Basin but I have never seen a greater profundity of water-borne flora and fauna than here in my own backyard, the ACE Basin. The 350,000 acre refuge formed by the Ashepoo, Combahee and Edisto rivers is a melange of wetlands; old rice fields, marshes; estuaries; salt, fresh and brackish waters and uplands ringed by cypress trees with trunks wide as ceiling fans.

The Nature Conservancy has called it one of the world's Last Great Places.
To push off in canoe from a pluff mud landing in an early morning mist is to enter a tannic water Shangri-La of ospreys and otters, gators and tundra swans, red-winged lackbirds and white ibises ringed by cordgrass prairies to the horizon and tupelo tree forests so dense the sunlight is tinted green. The ACE is about 35 miles southwest of Charleston and one of the largest undeveloped estuaries on the Eastern Seaboard.

What it truly is, is a wet wilderness that allows humans a gracious plenty to paddle through.