Topics Related to North Carolina State Parks

Image: The New River Gorge Bridge.George Santucci doesn’t worry anymore about the variety of spellings applied to his name in Ashe County, which he has called home for 25 years now after migrating from Long Island, New York. But he has lost most of his New York accent, and he’s a much-admired fellow in his adopted home, where he serves as the president of the New River Conservancy, charged with protecting America’s oldest river, said to be the second oldest in the world.“Once you get North of 350 million years,” Santucci says, “It’s a little iffy.”

Amid the swamps, forests, and fields of southeastern North Carolina lies an immense, shallow, strangely egg-shaped lake, whose rich natural environment and gently sloping freshwater shores have been an asset to the region’s industrial and touristic development for over a century and a half. The long and dynamic history of Lake Waccamaw reaches back not just centuries but millennia, beginning in a time when Columbus County looked more like Alaska than anything else.