Biking in Huntington Beach State Park, South Carolina

 

• Date Biked: Sunday, September 13, 2020
• Total miles Tracked: 10.15
• Type of Trail: Paved road, beach
• Conveniences: Restrooms, picnic tables, park store, shelters
• Best Features: Well designed boardwalks that show off the tidal marsh ecosystem
• Worst Features: A bit crowded
• Wildlife spotted:  Gators, wood-storks, spoonbills, herons
• Vegetation: Marsh grasses, sea-oats, live oaks, pines
• Associated Website: https://southcarolinaparks.com/huntington-beach
• Primary Author: James

Before Cheryl and I ever met, both of our families had picked Myrtle Beach as their top vacation destination. But, neither of us was particularly in love with the area. On the surface, the whole area is mainly an experience in wall to wall traffic, overpriced restaurants, unending miles of strip malls, and crowded beaches. Our opinions shifted radically after we started biking and kayaking, however. Murrells Inlet is a great place to kayak, and just south of the town there's a paved section of the East Coast Greenway that covers a little over ten miles. The first three miles run through Huntington Beach State Park, and are thickly forested, though the forest isn't quite thick enough to cover the road noise from Highway 17 which is never more than a few dozen yards away. Still, Cheryl and I have probably biked this greenway segment at least a dozen time, and we've kayaked in the marshes right up to the causeway that leads into Huntington Beach State Park, but we've never actually gone into the park itself to bike until this September. The park is only three miles long. Just how much biking could we really do in it? 

Nature's perfect biking surface.

Quite a bit, it turns out, and we didn't even ride the section of the East Coast Greenway on this trip. We parked in the first parking lot across the causeway. Our first destination was to walk up onto a boardwalk overlooking the pond there to see if we could spot alligators. Mission accomplished! We spotted three gators right off the bat. By the end of the day, we pretty much stopped counting. 

The other thing we stopped counting was birds. When we kayak through the marshes, we catch glimpses of a lot of birds, but mainly we're down low among walls of marsh grass, so unless the birds are in the channel right in front of us, we don't always get a great view. But, the park features boardwalks along the causeway and another out into the marsh that give you great views of numerous birds. Everywhere we looked there were storks, herons, egrets, and spoonbills. There are covered shelters along the walkways where you can sit and watch the wildlife in comfort. It's well worth the price of admission into the park. 

Apparently, even birds can have bad hair days. 

Of course, we didn't go in primarily for the wildlife. We were there to ride bikes. Were there enough bikeable miles inside the park to make for a good experience. Yep! While there's only a few miles of paved road in the park, the beach itself is an excellent riding surface. The section of beach nearest the visitor center had too many visitors for us to ride on comfortably, but the northern section of beach was mostly wide open, broad and firmly packed. It ends at a paved jetty that you can ride on, though it's narrow and has some ugly potholes. Still, there's something cool about riding with waves on both sides and the open ocean as your vanishing point. 

All in all, we biked 10 miles, and if we'd ridden out and back on the greenway sections at the entrance we could easily have gotten 16 miles. We're excited about returning here the next time we're in the area. It seems like an especially promising place to bike in the winter, when the beach is probably even less crowded.