Kathy Henry Dowell

Tracy Fehl Swartout can hardly believe her good fortune. After about seven years as a program manager and analyst with the National Park Service headquarters in Washington, D.C.—a job she loved—the native Columbian is back home and serving as Congaree National Park''s new superintendent—a job she really loves.

As superintendent, her duties include ensuring protection of the park's resources, overseeing the park's budget and operation, helping to plan for day-to-day operations, representing the park in external relations, and managing more than 12 staff members.

“I always knew I would go into environmental management or policy in some way,” said Swartout, who has a bachelor's degree in environmental geography from USC and a master's degree in natural resource management from the University of Waterloo in Canada. “I'm fascinated with usage of the land, how people interact with the land, and how we preserve resources for the future.”

Congaree National Park is a resource to be treasured. It is the largest remaining tract of old-growth bottomland hardwood forest in the United States. The 25,000-acre park is full of primeval forest, champion trees, and diverse plant and animal life. Loblolly pine, American elm, and water tupelo trees grow huge: the largest bald cypress in the park is a whopping 27 feet-5 inches in diameter. Several park trees are the largest of their type in North America.

The vitality of the park's ecosystem depends on the health of the Congaree River. About 10 times a year, a large portion of the park is flooded by the river. Most of the year, though, visitors can walk for miles and keep their feet dry. Wildlife is plentiful, and it isn't unusual to see several species of animals during a visit. White-tailed deer, river otters, barred owls, osprey, pileated woodpeckers, great blue herons, and a variety of snakes and lizards are seen quite often. Hikers and canoeists can see even more.

All park activities are free: exhibits and presentations in the Visitors Center, educational programs, library access, primitive camping, as well as hikes, canoe tours, and Owl Prowls.

Last fall, the Congaree National Park celebrated its third year as a National Park and its 30th year as a unit of the National Park System. Its successful future is fueled by USC professors and students conducting research, hundreds of thousands of appreciative visitors, friends dedicated to protecting it, and a new superintendent to lead it.

Born into a family of scientists and land management professionals, Swartout is living her passion.

“My husband is an environmental engineer, and the protection of the environment is important to both of us,” she said. “We aligned our career fields with our core beliefs and interests. What I did at USC was the perfect support for what I wanted to do in life.”

The USC coursework was rigorous: land management, geology, America's national parks, economic geography, cartography, global environmental change, and coastal zone management.

“The USC geography program is one of the best geography programs in the country,” she said. “I don't know another department like it. It's very close-knit: we went on canoe and hiking trips, and got to know our professors in and out of the classroom.”

Swartout was president of the USC Geography Club, worked part-time in the geography department, and worked as a Statehouse page and later as a legislative aide where she saw government in action. A member of USC's 1994 geography bowl team, she competed with the team regionally and nationally—they won the national bowl competition held in San Francisco that year. She also volunteered with The Nature Conservancy.

After completing her master's degree, she joined the National Park Service as a member of its Business Management Group in Washington, D.C. She conducted operations analyses and worked with 75 parks in seven years. She came to Congaree National Park September 28, 2006.

Though she's pleased with her new post, Swartout knows she will be called upon to make difficult decisions, possibly involving differing stakeholder groups, such as state and federal agencies, land developers, and nonprofit organizations.

“I think Tracy will find that the park offers a lot of managerial challenges, such as the eastward expansion of the park, the building of a new campground, and controlling non-native plant and animal species,” said retired geography professor Robert Janiskee, who launched USC's America's National Parks course in the 1980s and took every parks class he ever taught out to Congaree at least once. “She will find it a test that will allow her to use all of her knowledge and experience.”

In the 1970s, Janiskee was involved in the campaign to establish the Congaree Swamp National Monument, which was upgraded to National Park status in 2003. “I have a special fondness for the park,” he said, “and one of the most interesting aspects of my 66-semester-long academic career is that now one of my students is superintendent.”

Swartout also took courses under geography professor Susan Cutter.

“She worked with me in the department's hazards lab, helping us with data entry and data analysis,” Cutter recalled. “She had a real aptitude for the work. I believe she is the start of a wave of women in environmental management positions.

“More than half of the geography graduate student population nationally is female, and there are many more opportunities in these professions than even a decade ago,” Cutter said. “I'm seeing more females in my courses: at the undergraduate level it is about 50-50, but women outnumber men at the graduate level. There is a lot of interest in environmental themes, such as geographic information science, human environmental interactions, and human geography.”


Art Cohen loves swamps. He lives for mud and muck, gets excited about peat, and is positively giddy about pollen.

“A swamp is a fantastic archive of historic events,” said Cohen, a geology professor who has conducted research in swamps across North America. “It allows us to understand the changes in climate throughout geologic time, which is important, particularly as we get toward the present. If we see some peculiar thing that happened in, say, the past 100 years, then we can pin that on human impact and make changes now.” Jessica Whit, one of Cohen's Ph.D. students, is studying trace elements in the park, specifically in Muck Swamp, located near the start of the park's boardwalk.

“Jessica is interested in organic-rich sediments,” Cohen said. “They act as natural kidneys. When water—from rain or flooding—runs through the sediment, the contaminants are extracted so that they do not contaminate other areas.”

Cohen and Ph.D. student David Shelley have found peat deposits from 21,000 years ago in the park. Pollen deposits found in the peat act as plant fingerprints: by studying them, researchers can discover what plants were growing there at one time.

“The samples show pollen from spruce trees, which don't grow in South Carolina now, and Alaska's state flower,” Cohen said. “That kind of record doesn't exist in other areas, and if it did, it has been farmed or developed, destroying the archive. Congaree Park is a natural lab and is such a great research area because it has been protected and untouched for a while. There's a record of the past 20,000 years or so stored right there.”

Shelley also is involved in a project to map the park.

“The National Park Service requested geological maps of all its park units and there were no such maps of the Congaree area,” he said. “They funded the work, along with the S.C. Department of Natural Resources Geological Survey. In January, I published six maps of the park's flood plain. It was the culmination of two years' worth of research.”

Shelley's knowledge has served him well: he recently became the education coordinator at the park's education center, where he works with park researchers and staff to develop education programs and materials.

USC undergraduates have been involved in mapping and creating resources for the park, too: geography undergraduates created the map that visitors use to get around the park.


John Grego vividly remembers the upheaval of his first visit to the park.

“I went out there six days after Hurricane Hugo crashed through the area,” he said. “Later, numerous projects were set up to study the affects of Hugo and I got involved as a volunteer.”

A statistics professor and director of the USC Statistics Lab, Grego just began his eighth year of involvement with the park and his fourth year as president of Friends of the Congaree Swamp. The Friends are interested in advocacy and ensuring that the park remains a resource for the community. Grego's contacts with the S.C. Department of Natural Resources and other state and federal agencies make him a valuable asset.

“USC has always had an interesting relationship with the park,” Grego said. “The past two to four years it has been the most constructive I've ever seen it.” He has been involved in research concerning the park's feral hogs, bird counts, and a cultural project that includes collecting oral interviews with people who live in the area. The Friends, he said, support these types of projects.

USC botanist John Nelson, another Friends member, helps with research on rare species and management concerns, among other things.

“The importance of the park for me is that it is one of the most outstanding natural areas in our nation, fully able to rival some of the western national parks,” said Nelson, who has headed USC's herbarium since 1990.

“When I was a senior at USC, I took Dr. Wade T. Batson's Fall's Flora class,” he said. “One of our field trips was to the Congaree Swamp National Monument, which is what it was called then, and it was unbelievable to be in a wild, pristine place like that. Though it's impossible to fill Dr. Batson's boots, I have been able to move into his old teaching position, which is an academic thrill for me. And I take at least one field trip to Congaree during each class I teach.”

Geography department chair Will Graf arrived at USC in 2001 and became involved at Congaree through Senator Fritz Hollings' office. “I helped his staff with information regarding the scientific significance of the park,” said Graf, a water specialist. “I looked at the park from that point on as an opportunity to do research that would benefit students and the University.” He began funded research at the park with three graduate students in 2004.

It was Graf who introduced John Kupfer to the park—during his USC job interview, no less.

“Will arranged for me to meet the former park superintendent because he knew I had done research on floodplain ecology and he wanted to get me interested in working at Congaree,” Kupfer said. “I'm in my second year at USC, and thanks to funding from the Park Service and USC, I regularly take students out to the park. We are interested in regrowth, as well as human activities that have influenced this area and created some natural resource management challenges.

“It's important that the University maintain a strong scientific connection with this national park,” he continued. “It will help us continue our environmental research and service to the state, and it will help maintain the park as an international treasure.”

Kupfer has, in turn, introduced numerous students to the park, including Ashley Pipkin. The senior geography major is studying the Bates Ford tract near the confluence of the Wateree and Congaree rivers. Guided by Kupfer, she is studying forest regeneration on areas that were logged before the Park Service acquired the tract in 2005. In December, Pipkin was named a Magellan Scholar—a highly competitive research and mentoring opportunity created for USC undergraduates—and received funding to delve deeper into the Bates Ford Tract.

“I was helping Dr. Kupfer take measurements and samples of the area, and I became interested in how the soils were affecting tree growth,” she said. “Now I have a ton of questions I want to explore.”

Questions are good, as Superintendent Swartout knows. Answers are even better. Hopefully, she will find that answers to tough questions surrounding Congaree National Park will come a little easier, thanks to USC scientists and their students.