♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ A little chilly today.

It's good to be out though.

This is a spectacular part of the state!

We've got a good day in store.

Looking forward to it.

Hello, I'm Jim Welch.

Welcome to NatureScene with our guide, Rudy Mancke, curator of natural history at the State Museum.

We're on a road leading to Burrell's Ford, more specifically, in Sumter National Forest.

In Oconee County, a special part of South Carolina.

A part lots of South Carolinians miss because when they think of mountains they think of North Carolina or Tennessee.

We've got some interesting ones in Oconee, Pickens, and Greenville Counties.

Today we're on a road that leads toward Burrell's Ford and one of my favorite places in South Carolina... the only wild and scenic river we've got, the Chattooga River.

The Chattooga River has been called one of the finest, most beautiful, scenic wild rivers in the nation.

It's spectacular, not only for people who like to go down in rafts or kayaks, but for naturalists who like to walk and see what happens as you go toward a river and get a feeling for plants and animals that are common in the mountains.

We're probably not going to see a lot of animals.

I hope we'll see a monarch or two.

I think we're going to spend more time with plants and rocks.

This is one of the more exciting areas of our state to talk about what these rocks tell us about the past, some of the stories.

We won't be doing much heavy-scale hiking or climbing, but these mountains here do provide that opportunity.

Oh, sure, and outcrops like the one we're standing next to tell us that under all the interesting plants and all the vegetation, there's some exciting stories to be told in these rocks.

Almost all of these are metamorphic rocks... gneisses and schists, they're called.

There are two distinct varieties of metamorphic rocks.

Metamorphic rocks are rocks that have been squeezed and pushed and shoved.

Why don't we get a closer look?

Rudy, you said squeezed, pushed, and shoved.

This was created a long time ago through what method, in a sense?

Well, I like to touch these things because it's fun to think about how they got here.

We believe now-- the people who study these, not only here, but all over the state and elsewhere-- that these are signs of a continental collision that occurred way back in time probably between what we now call Europe or Africa and North America.

Squeezing rocks, changing them.

Tremendous amounts of pressure and heat.

Folding them a good bit.

You can see signs of that in these rocks.

Fracturing them, forcing them up to form the Appalachian Mountains.

Since these were formed, they were very steep, great climbing mountains then.

There were just no people here to climb them.

They've been worn down to the rounded mountains we know by the magic of water.

That's part of the Chattooga River story.

This escarpment--some of the ridges that jut out here-- this one had some blasting done for the road, or is this one natural?

No, this has been opened up.

You can see a couple of places, little areas that drills have been used.

Probably slipped some dynamite in there and blew out a section to make this road and to make it more accessible.

We'll talk more about rocks as we get to the river.

Usually when you have rock exposed like this, there's water that seeps out.

This has been fairly dry, but you can see some ferns, those lacy things.

(Jim) Brown?

Yeah...some stay green during the wintertime.

There's some Christmas fern up there that's still green, but others dry up.

Look up top... the mountain laurel and even the red on the oaks still left.

Scotch pine, or is it white pine?

Probably white pine there.

Take a look at these trees.

Here are a couple of trees we often confuse.

They're really shrubs... mountain laurel and rhododendron, behind.

Side by side.

When you see these two plants together, you can see differences that are pretty obvious.

Both have leaves that stay on during the winter.

The one in the back with larger leaves is rhododendron, beautiful pinkish or whitish flowers earlier in the year.

The one below it is mountain laurel, again with beautiful flowers.

Very different flowers though.

You can see differences in the leaf, the shape and size of the leaves.

Easy to tell the difference when they are close.

A little tougher when they're separated.

The smaller leaf is mountain laurel.

A lot of people in the mountains lump those two together and either call them both rhododendron or both laurels.

Does Kalmia fit in there somewhere?

Kalmia is the genus name for that mountain laurel.

There's also some fruit there.

See those bluish, berrylike things hanging down?

That's the fruit on Solomon's seals, which is a plant that's very common up here.

We said this was a little more moist than other areas because of the seepage.

The fact that the ferns and Solomon's seals are here tell us that.

They're potentially new Solomon's seal plants.

The fruit and the flowers would be in pairs.

You see there... very distinct.

This is the time of year to look for fruit.

I cannot pass up a look across the way.

Let's take a close look at what the mountains look like in Oconee County.

See the mountain rising over there with all the colors?

The hardwoods here are unbelievable!

It reminds me--James Dickey said, "That's God's poetry."

If you could capture those colors in a quilt, it would be phenomenal!

There's also green out there.

The most common tree out there that's green, sticking up all along the way, are white pines.

They're found nowhere except the mountains of our state naturally.

They've been transmitted or transported by man a good bit.

The other green one you may see is one of the hemlocks, doing well, especially on these sloping areas down to a creek.

You hear the creek barely down there, rumbling, heading toward the Chattooga River.

Millions of dollars in value as far as timber here.

Other things are valuable, too, that are hard to put a dollar value on.

How much is this worth because it's beautiful?

It reminds us that we're a part of this world.

This is a special part of the heritage of South Carolina.

We need to protect it.

Thank goodness in places like this, we are.

I see another rock outcrop we need to take a look at.

(Rudy) There are a lot of interesting things around rock outcrops like this, usually.

I see something in there.

You see what I'm looking at?

Three little tubes?

What are those, Jim?

Natural protection for the mud dauber.

Mud daubers come in a couple of varieties in South Carolina.

This one...common name is the organ-pipe wasp.

You can see those pipe shapes.

There are holes there where young wasps have gnawed their way out and escaped.

They haven't come out of the other side yet.

A perfect place for it.

You find them sometimes under a roof overhang.

You have to do that because you're using mud.

If you leave it in an open area it washes away.

There are young developing inside.

Not only do wasps use sheltered places like this, but in Oconee County and this part of the state, I am reminded of the Cherokee Indians who used areas like this and eventually built shelters for themselves.

They started using rock shelters.

We find lots of Indian material in areas like this.

Of course, the name Oconee is an Indian name.

There's so many Indian names scattered throughout South Carolina.

Too bad the Cherokees aren't here as they once were.

This was their domain for a long, long time.

I'm afraid we ran them out in the 1800s.

This was the land of the Cherokee.

It's beautiful and provides protection and a good place for their houses.

They were some of the first people to fish the rivers, hunt the game, and live here.

We find lots of their artifacts, although we've lost some areas, covering them with lakes.

Keowee is a good example.

Here's a pine that, when you look at it, you notice the leaves or needles look whitish.

You see, they're not bright green.

There's a little white glow on those things... silvery color.

This is the white pine.

I want to get a cluster of needles and show you why we call this white pine.

Most of the pines that we have have needles in clusters of two or three, but this one pretty clearly has needles in clusters of five.

W-h-i-t-e. Five letters in the word... easy to remember.

This is the only pine we've got with five needles together.

Not only is it whitish in color from a distance, but this is also an identifying characteristic.

These are leaves that are not shed all at once.

We say this is evergreen.

They don't stay on forever, but they don't shed all their leaves at one shot in the fall.

This is one of the trees we know as conifers.

We could almost pronounce that "cone-i-fer" because conifers have cones.

Hopefully as we get further and get more mature trees we'll see typical white pine cones, different from most other pine trees.

It's a beautiful pine used for Christmas trees.

From this angle this would make a pretty tree.

That would be about the right age for that.

There are tree farms in South Carolina and some money being made.

This tree does best in this part of the state.

Beautiful...really makes it special here.

Something else here we want to look at.

We haven't seen many flowers today.

You see that one over here?

I do... white.

Look at the frilly leaves.

Those are really clusters of flowers that look like individual flowers.

That's called yarrow.

It's an introduction.

You find it scattered around the state.

It does well this time of year.

Most of what we see here is fruit.

Look at that nice tree that brightens up the forest in autumn.

See the yellowish leaves, a few still left.

Yellow poplar or tuliptree is the name.

There's fruit on that.

This time of year you expect fruit, not so often the flowers.

Look at the puffy fruit here.

Almost cotton looking.

Well, it looks cottony.

Those are plant fibers that could be used like cotton.

It's fairly common up here, a variety of plant known as Clematis.

Many people use cultivated clematis vines in their yard because of the beautiful flowers, but the fruit's also nice.

This is the time of year when people who like dried arrangements can go wild.

They could have a field day here if it wasn't the Sumter National Forest.

You're not allowed to take things.

Exactly, and that's good.

Whenever you take from a place, you want to leave a good bit behind.

Nature can do wonderful things this time of year.

Pretty time to be out!

Let's head toward the river.

♪ Walking down a road like this, there's so much to see.

See the fruit on that tree, the red fruit?

Dogwood tree.

Right, flowering dogwood.

Squirrels take advantage of that.

And birds.

Here's one of the crazy things you find along roads that man has made.

That is an introduced grass.

Looks almost like pampas grass.

Doesn't get that large.

Introduced, you've mentioned on other NatureScenes, but it's something brought in by man.

This is the perfect place for it.

This has been put here... man's doing here.

Probably threw a little grass seed out to stabilize the banks, that was in it, and it got started... doing pretty well.

Here is something I have never seen this large before in my life, with fruit on it.

Look at that fruit!

This is called the devil's walking stick or Hercules-club.

Whitish flowers earlier in the year, fruit this time of the year.

(Rudy) We need to remind ourselves that we could come here over and over, and it'd always be different.

Nature can astound you!

This thing would have flowers on it at one time.

Now it has fruit on it.

(Jim) You mentioned it on the way up, but it was six-, eight-, ten-foot plants.

This is a monster here!

Called devil's walking stick because of this.

See the spines sticking out of it?

Look at this little orchid.

Ladies' tresses orchid, coming right out of the ground.

Oh, that's beautiful!

There are about 50 varieties of orchids in South Carolina.

This one comes up on a stalk with small, white flowers.

When you walk down a road like this, go slowly enough that you can see these things.

If we hadn't come to look at the devil's walking stick, we might have missed it.

These are scattered around the state, quite a few varieties.

We don't know specifically which one, but ladies' tresses orchid is the name.

This area next to the road is going to be cut.

Will it come back?

Usually this will do fine in a situation like this.

When you study areas like this, you can predict what's going to be there oftentimes.

This one also likes moisture.

It's lower here, has a little more moisture going, a little more sunlight available to it.

It's an interesting find.

One of 50 kinds found in the state.

Right.

♪ Look at the rhododendron.

That's a beautiful clump, next to the dogwood.

Yeah, even with leaves left on it.

Holly with green leaves, still, and fruit...almost Christmassy!

This is a beautiful walk down this road toward Burrell's Ford.

Look over here!

Here's a plant that's interesting and very typical of this kind of deciduous forest.

This variety of plant is really a primitive one called ground pine or groundcedar.

It's not a flowering plant at all and reproduces by forming little stalks that come up.

They produce spores in there.

Let me just shake it.

Look at that!

All of that yellow material that's coming out of there are spores that will be blown by the wind, land, and again form new colonies of this plant.

Lycopodium is a scientific name for it, but ground pine or groundcedar is the name most people use.

Oftentimes they use these little stalks in plant arrangements, flower arrangements around Christmastime.

It's really pretty... stays green even when it's pulled up out of the ground.

The river's not too much further on.

I'm excited, but you've pointed out so many exciting things that people walk right by on a walk like this.

Well, it's fun going slow.

Sometimes you get in so much of a hurry you miss everything interesting on the way.

We've got to stop a minute to look at hemlock.

We've seen the tree already, but look at the cones.

One of the conifers that does well here.

Perfectly shaped, all the same size.

They're used often around Christmastime for corsages and other things.

Interesting little cones.

This is a tree you expect to find here.

You don't really find it anywhere else.

Down here is another one of the conifers, at least a piece of one... the white pine cone.

Most pine trees have cones that sit up on the branch.

This one dangles down a little and also has the sticky, sappy, resinous material... pine smell, of course.

Most of the seed have already fallen out.

Very interesting plant.

White pines are typical of this area of the world.

A touch of Christmas right here at the Chattooga River.

Oh, man... yeah, spectacular!

There's one thing, talking about Christmas.

See the little cluster of plants over there, Galax?

That's exciting.

The leaves are often used as greenery around Christmastime because they're leathery leaves, and they stay green a good bit of the time.

You can even see a few fruiting stalks coming up.

Interesting plant, again, in the mountains that stays green throughout the winter.

I hear the Chattooga.

Let's go look at it.

Let's get our feet wet!

♪ Crunching leaves are nice, aren't they?

The woods are so pretty this time of year, any time of year, really.

Each season has its own flavor.

That's what makes it so nice.

That's what makes the world so exciting.

We've got so much variety in South Carolina.

From the rare to the quite common.

I want to show you something rare right off the trail.

We need to head off here.

Then we'll be down by the river.

Okay.

I wanted to bring you over here to show you one plant that's really rare in South Carolina.

When you think of the Chattooga River, I think of this plant.

It was a plant that was lost for a while called Oconee bells.

Named that because--it's not flowering this time of year-- there would be flower stalks coming up with individual white, bell-shaped flowers hanging down from this cluster.

These plants were first found by Michaux, who was a French naturalist.

He collected some and sent them back to Europe.

It was lost for a while.

Somebody saw that in a collection and said, I've never seen this plant in the wild.

They came and looked where he said he had found it in Appalachia, the Carolinas, and found it again.

It's found only in the southern Appalachians.

It's extremely rare in South Carolina.

It's a species that's only found in the mountain counties.

Often confused with Galax.

I see a little over there.

Let me get a Galax leaf, pop it off, and just compare the two.

It's like mountain laurel and rhododendron... it's easy to tell the difference when they're together and sometimes tough when they're apart.

This Galax leaf has more of a rounded leaf, and also the petiole, the stalk of the leaf, is round.

It's totally round.

There's not a scooped out area on the top of the petiole.

When you compare it to the Shortia here-- You can see quite clearly.

The edges of the Shortia leaf come together to form a little tube, and also this petiole is scooped out.

Those are two big differences.

The flowers are very different, but most of the year you don't see it with flowers on.

This Galax-- I broke a leaf off--it's common, no problem.

This I would not break a leaf off because this is extremely rare.

We're being careful here not to damage it.

Shortia is another name for this.

It doesn't grow very large.

Shortia is one name, Oconee bells is another.

You have to come to the mountains to see things like this.

Let's go to the river.

Yeah...right down this way.

[leaves crunching underfoot] (Rudy) Better be careful getting down here.

This is a beautiful place!

What is so great about it is the Cherokee Indians have fished and walked on these same spots.

Nothing much has changed, except maybe the rocks have worn down a little more.

(Rudy) The river is a little low this time.

This is the lowest I've ever seen it!

Look at that view up there.

Isn't that phenomenal?!

One of the things people come to the Chattooga River for is not natural history in general, but trout.

This is one of the trout-fishing areas of South Carolina.

Little pools like the one behind us and rapids like this-- get a can of corn, fishing line, throw it in, let it run down.

It's a good way to catch trout.

Many of them are native, but a lot are stocked from the fish hatchery.

What better way to spend the day than on a rock up here catching trout for the family meal and appreciating nature.

And thinking about how old these rocks are, how they tell a story about continental collision, squeezed, pushed, and shoved, and how Cherokee Indians were active in these same places.

As you've said, very little has changed.

The river is rounding rocks.

Look at that pile of rounded rocks.

When the river is up, it's rolling those rocks.

The very name Chattooga, Rudy, as you know, in Cherokee, means "rocky water."

Perfect name for it.

The action of water rolling those rocks, bouncing them against one another, rounds them down.

You see how rounded or smoothed off that rock is in front of us.

Looks like people have worked forever on it.

Of course, they didn't.

Cherokees weren't rounding off these rocks...the river was.

This river has been here a long, long, time, way before the Indians arrived in this area, taking a little bit of the mountain away and dumping it eventually in the Atlantic Ocean.

As near back as maybe 200, 300 years ago, Cherokee could have fished from this very spot.

Let's try to work our way around to that little sandbar for a minute.

(Rudy) I think I even see a little butterfly.

[water gurgling] Oh, yeah!

Let's just be careful.

And you without your net!

I don't have a net, and hopefully it'll sit there long enough to let us take a quick look.

That's a monarch butterfly, flying probably down toward Mexico.

Not all of them make it.

There are a lot of checks and balances.

Spiders get a few, and birds try for some, although they're distasteful.

Some birds might squeeze and kill them before they get away.

This one's resting.

I guess, maybe getting some water.

Let's try to get a little closer.

Maybe I can get him on a finger since we don't have a net.

I don't know what's going on with him.

He doesn't seem to want to fly.

Look at there!

Come on, come on.

Sometimes, you know, Jim, we need to slow down enough to reach out and touch things, and to realize that the Cherokee Indians and us and monarch butterflies and these trees and the fish are all a part of a great, big world.

We're related to one another.

That is really phenomenal!

Look at that!

Beautiful animal!

They start here and go down to Mexico?

Yeah, head down toward Mexico.

See how tattered those hind wings are?

That's not a good sign, and the fact that it allows me to pick it up is not really a good sign.

We'll put it on the side and wish it well.

That is a great flying machine that nature came up with a long while ago, migrating away from this cold weather.

Look at those little antennae sticking out.

So pretty!

I don't want to hold him any longer or leave him here.

Oops... there he goes!

Maybe he'll make it back to Mexico.

Grab that rock...we've talked about rocks a little.

Talked about how smooth they get too.

Look how smooth that is.

It really changes colors with the water.

That's one of the metamorphic rocks we were talking about.

One of the schists... got a lot of mica in it.

This is another variety of rock, lot of quartz in it...feldspar.

Oh, my goodness!

One of the minerals that's common here in metamorphic rock, especially...garnets.

A nice big one and two smaller ones.

Usually they are found in areas where rocks have been squeezed.

That's typical of the mountains here.

Garnets are pretty interesting and can be taken out-- Used in jewelry.

You see flecks of mica here and there.

There's a lot of mica in the stream here.

This has been a good day.

We've seen a lot, and I think we've shown how special the mountains are in South Carolina.

We thank the U.S. Forest Service for their help.

We hope you'll go out and see things like this.

It's a shame not to take advantage of these opportunities.

I see why the Cherokee loved this part of the country.

Why don't you throw that rock into Georgia.

On the Georgia side, there it goes!

All the way across into Georgia!

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