SC coastal swamp climbing - Bald Cypress

I'm visiting in South Carolina for a week so I did the research, made some educated guesses and found some excellent wilderness trees. This is in a huge coastal forest, very flat and full of winding creeks and flooded woods. Access is to drive in on forest service roads, then put a canoe in and start exploring. I found a fair number of large ancient Bald Cypress and decent Loblolly Pine on "higher" ground (that would be 2-3 feet above the water level). As all the swamp climbers know, it's pretty tricky getting a rope up into trees like this, you have to work primarily out of your canoe, definitely adds a twist to the climbing process.

Here are some photos from a cypress climb, the tree gods were good to me on this one, got a high limb on my second slingshot throw. Nothing about the climb was easy, my initial route was into the outer crown SRT with a 200' rope anchored on a small Water Tupelo, I tailed a shorter DRT rope and used that to move horizontally towards the trunk once I was high enough. I left my SRT system attached to a limb and came back to it to exit the tree. Nice thing about canoe climbing is you can bring much more rope than you'd want to carry on your back.

By the time I got out of the tree it was dark with a bit of moonlight, the Barred Owl calls were echoing through the swamp and the Spring Peeper tree frogs were getting warmed up. Also had a beaver hanging around and it insisted on slapping it's tail a few times as I paddled out.

Nice open main creek


Trunk view during ascent


Canoe below


Monster limbs in the lower crown


Looking down to the creek


Fused limbs


Sunset from the top


All the photos here

-AJ

Man I need to go tree climbing,