SUMTER, S.C. (AP) - The foundation that oversees South Carolina’s Palmetto Trail is looking for money to link one part of the trail in Richland County to another mostly in Sumter County.
The 26-mile (42-kilometer) new trail will be called the Cook’s Mountain Passage and connect a current trail near Fort Jackson in Columbia to the Wateree Passage in southeast Richland County, The Sumter Item reported.
When built, Cook’s Mountain Passage will provide a critical link in the goal to complete 500 miles (805 kilometers) of walking trails from the mountains to the sea in South Carolina, Palmetto Conservation Foundation officials said.
“What we’re focusing on with this Cook’s Mountain Passage is the continuation of our goal, which is to complete the trail and connect it from the coast all the way to the mountains,” Midlands Region Trail Coordinator Furman Miller said.
The foundation has applied for a grant to pay for the trail through the federal Recreational Trails Program and should find out if it gets the money in the spring.
If the grant is awarded, construction would start soon after and at least part of the new trail section could be open by the end of 2021, officials said.
The trail will use old access service roads to the Wateree River Heritage Preserve and includes land the Department of Natural Resources obtained in a 2015 deal that allowed Romarco Minerals Inc. to open a gold mine near Camden, officials said.
The foundation wants to include Cook’s Mountain as part of the trail. The 400-foot tall hill was formed when the nearby Congaree and Wateree Rivers eroded away the Aiken Plateau over millions of years, leaving the isolated high spot in the mostly flat surrounding land around Richland and Sumter counties.
“We would eventually like to be able to cut a trail up and over Cook’s Mountain itself that involves a lot of the agricultural studies that are currently going on,” Miller said.
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