Cely Map: Unveiling Congaree National Park’s Hidden Details

The Cely Map, as it’s known, is the creation of John Cely, a 77-year-old retired biologist who’s been wandering around the tupelo sloughs, loblolly stands, and sandy hummocks of the South Carolina swamp for virtually 60 years, long before it was a national forest.

The Making of the Cely Map

The second map, on the other hand, is a trouble of information. Reeled in penalty, felt-tipped black, the exact same amorphous synopsis of the park’s boundaries bursts with embellishments: historical residues, typhoon blowdowns, decades-old logging scars, run-down hunting lodges, also soil damage from beavers and wild boars. Flagged are several of the park’s 25 “Champ Trees”– each standing for the biggest of their types in the country– and greater than a hundred of the meandering, small channels that fill with tannin-dark water when the Congaree River increases and floods the forest each springtime.

This was 25 years back, a time when GPS had not been yet commonly offered. Cely depended on his compass and pacing to design a precise depiction of the terrain, counting his actions to figure out just how far to place, state, the stand of dead pines from the little oxbow lake on the much southeastern side of the park. For days at a time, he followed and laid out the thousands of threadlike rivers that weave with the tupelo, tulip, and cypress poplars of the overload, naming them as he did: Scrubby Intestine, Horseshoe Fish Pond, Big Serpent Slough.

GPS and Terrain Mapping

Over the decades, Cely has actually gotten involved in the grassroots efforts that succeeded in protecting the land from growth, first as Congaree Swamp National Monolith in 1976, and after that as Congaree National Park in 2003.” It can be a complicated and extremely hazardous area,” states John Grego, head of state of the Pals of Congaree Swamp, a not-for-profit that supports conservation efforts in and around the park. To start his task, Cely, who has no official art training, developed a base map of the park’s boundaries by tracing an airborne photograph. Cely relied on his compass and pacing to design a precise depiction of the terrain, counting his actions to figure out how far to place, claim, the stand of dead pines from the little oxbow lake on the far southeastern side of the park.

Protecting Congaree Swamp

Flagged are several of the park’s 25 “Champion Trees”– each representing the largest of their varieties in the country– and more than a hundred of the meandering, small channels that fill up with tannin-dark water when the Congaree River climbs and floods the woodland each spring.

So exact, in fact, that a recent lidar survey discovered that the representations of features in Cely’s map are mainly precise to within eight meters (about 26 feet). “It is a remarkable accomplishment,” creates Raymond Torres, an University of South Carolina rock hound that worked with the job. “The degree of detail … and the exact placement of that details is entirely impressive, particularly considered that much of the map was made prior to the availability of cost effective GPS gadgets.”

Map Accuracy and Impact

The retired biologist updates his map (currently on variation 4.1) from time to time, after a hurricane travels through or a large tree drops– adjustments he’s apt to discover on his near-daily rambles around the overload.

Cely was 17 the first time he checked out, a student at Clemson College majoring in biology. He had composed an appreciating letter to the reporter Harry Hampton– who had been supporting for the preservation of the floodplain forest in his paper columns since the 1950s– and Hampton welcomed him to find see it for himself in 1967. Cely, who would take place to make his occupation as a bird biologist helping the state, was gobsmacked by the myriad wildlife and magnificent woods he located there.

Motivation and Recognition

However in the late 1990s, Cely started to seem like he hadn’t done sufficient to add to the landscape he enjoyed so much. “I really did not have much to warrant all these years of knocking around this place with the exception of photographs and old memories,” he claims.

Possibly extra unexpected to Cely, the map rapidly ended up being an essential tool for those entrusted with taking care of the park and its site visitors. “The best praise is that rangers and law enforcement utilize it,” he states.

All informed, it took Cely concerning three years– or “a great long while,” as he puts it– to produce his 4-x-2-foot map. When he showed his job to park staff in 2001, they responded enthusiastically, putting it on sale in the present shop beside the official map, with proceeds mosting likely to sustain the Pals of Congaree Swamp.

In the first one, published by the National forest Service, a lot of the information is focused in the top left edge near the park’s head office: loops of treking trails plotted in populated lines, significant rivers made in icy blue. The remainder of the map– the park’s 22,000-acre backcountry– is illustrated as a barren expanse of light environment-friendly, disrupted only by a periodic swirl of topography or the faint squiggle of a creek.

Congaree National Park Maps

While the second map may look more like a wayward image from a kids’s publication than a navigational aid, current geological surveys have located it to be surprisingly precise. It’s so exact that Congaree’s park rangers prefer it over the official version.

To start his project, Cely, that has no official art training, created a base map of the park’s borders by mapping an airborne photo. “Then I went to work completing as much detail as I could,” he says. “A lot of the details was in my head. I simply needed to put it to paper.”

“It can be a very unsafe and complex place,” claims John Grego, head of state of the Buddies of Congaree Swamp, a nonprofit that supports conservation initiatives around the park. Deep in the timbers during high summer, he describes, both skies and horizon disappear completely in a jumble of tree branches and laurel thickets. “It’s extremely easy to get shed, to tip off the trail and head in the wrong instructions.”

Over the years, Cely has actually participated in the grassroots efforts that prospered in safeguarding the land from growth, initially as Congaree Swamp National Monolith in 1976, and then as Congaree National Park in 2003. He additionally played a leading role in finding, gauging, and cataloguing the park’s Champion Trees, the largest concentration of the leviathans anywhere in the United States. He’s led wildlife studies, bird-banding terminals, and, for the last two decades, a twice-monthly directed stroll for visitors, introducing them to the plants and fauna of the swamp, situated 25 miles southeast of the state funding of Columbia.

Cely was cognizant that the Congaree people that populated the overload for centuries prior to Europeans showed up most likely had their own names for these locations. “However a lot of them have been shed to history,” he regrets. “So I just utilized my creativity and did my finest.”

The existing maps, based upon topographical surveys and airborne pictures, had a tendency to flatten the place right into a featureless space. A homemade, hand-drawn map, on the various other hand, might depict every one of the special qualities– the apparent, logging roads, and beech groves– that made its numerous acres accessible.

In the gift store of South Carolina’s Congaree National forest, site visitors can select between two maps to help them discover the biggest stretch of old-growth bottomland hardwood woodland left in North America.