Harleyville, SC

Our Last Day of Service

Francis Beidler Forest: Harleyville, South Carolina

We rounded out our last day of service at the Francis Beidler Forest on Thursday March 27th. Everyone loaded up the vans and headed to the Audubon Center bright and early where we met up with Mike the sanctuary manager. From there, we took about an hour long drive to another area to clear some trails at that location. Our group had been given the name "Tree Piranhas" by Mike on one of our first days volunteering because of our fast and aggressive way of clearing the trails. We lived up to this name as we tore threw the new trail clearing off the trees that had been blown over by an ice storm in South Carolina that occurred this winter.

Besides clearing the trail, we also found time to stop and take a few pictures. One picture was of our group posing like models around a huge tree. The twitter post of that included the hashtag "MABeautiful." We split into two groups so one group could clear one side of the trail while the other cleared the other side. My group had some pretty interesting conversations about Game of Thrones as we lopped through trees and vines. It seemed like the day went by really fast, and it was hard to believe that our service was over when we met back up with the other group at the end of the trail. I think we were all pretty tired as we loaded up the loppers into the truck for the last time, but knowing we were able to help out Mike and the other workers at the Francis Beidler Forest made it very worth it.

That evening when we went back to the cabin some of the group wanted to go out on the swamp in kayaks one last time. The swamp looked so beautiful and peaceful. We ended up seeing two alligators laying out in the sun and one of them was the biggest alligator we had seen all week. I was so glad we were able to go out on the swamp one last time and it was a great way to round out our last day of service.