Luck Running Out for Horseshoe Lake

Luck Running Out for Horseshoe Lake

by Mitch Lloyd

a Carolina Paddler Article

∞ Horseshoe Lake is an old, slowly dying Carolina Bay in Bladen County, part of the Suggs Mill Gamelands. Death for a Carolina Bay lake is a geological process that takes thousands of years of slow conversion as vegetation grows, dies, forms peat and fills in the lake. Succession waves of vegetation slowly creep towards the changeover to marsh, bog, pocosin or other wetland.  Horseshoe Lake is an excellent place for us to see this natural transition in progress.

Carolina Bays are shallow depressions which held water in their beginnings. White Lake is about 8 feet deep, Waccamaw Lake is deepest at about 12 feet, Horseshoe Lake is about 5 feet deep mainly due to human intervention. Close by Little Singletary Lake is less than 3 feet deep.

The middle of Horseshoe Lake is well on the transition to a pocosin, a place of trees and bushes living in a few inches of water, so thick that only snakes and frogs and critters can penetrate it. Horseshoe Lake has two very shallow crescent arms that still hold shallow water, both arms nearly choked off from the rest of the lake as the growth from the shore meets plant mass from the middle.

These arms are filled with floating peat mats (bog mats) that support carnivorous bladderworts and pitcher plants. In the depth of summer these are hot, merciless places where the lack of moving air chokes your throat and the August Carolina sun cooks your head while air-frying your face with reflections from the still waters.

The presence of old stumps and shards of stumps indicates to me that the lake was lower in the past; what is now open water was at one time a forested swamp or cypress dome. I think when early settlers found the remnants of the Carolina Bay lake they saw the potential and created a millpond with a sawmill and a grist mill owned by the Suggs family. They could have raised the original banks at the lake drainage and dug out some canal to make a higher dam for better water power, flooding the aging pond two hundred years ago to what we know today. I think man’s efforts have disturbed and delayed the natural processes, otherwise, today Horseshoe Lake would at best be a small shallow pond, if at all.  But that’s my belief, absent any recorded history or scientific research to support it.

Horseshoe Lake is now best known for being a premier place to see huge quantities of carnivorous pitcher plants, millions of them live on the floating peat mats and on the forefront of the succession process, one of the first plants to live and die, building the peat mats until larger bushes and later trees can continue the process. It is a beautiful sight in April to see those millions of pitcher plants blooming with a single yellow flower. Many of us make a trip here every year to see the event.

But something has changed this year. The man-made dam had a deteriorated spillway that was replaced this past winter. The damage was so bad the lake had to be lowered more than the original plans, basically drained except for a number of “holes” that still held water and fish and animals. This caused all those floating peat mats to dry out, in addition to a harsh freeze in January. Coupled with all this has been an extremely dry winter. The lake, which is supplied solely by rainwater, has not refilled. The thick horizontal rhizomes that are the main bodies of the pitcher plants (which are actually leaves) have been frozen and may be dead due to prolonged dryness. This year, only a very few pitcher plants can be observed, a dozen here or there in sheltered spots. The great vista of majestic carnivorous plants is gone. I fear the pitcher plant may be effectively gone for many years from Horseshoe Lake, since this is now flowering time and so few are seen. I dread that the great preserve is damaged for the rest of my life span.  Next April will tell us if the plants will bounce back or be relegated to the multi-year process of regrowth and spreading.

If you want to view nature’s process for the natural lifespan of all lakes in a condensed and viewable version, visit Horseshoe Lake later this year after our current drought has ended. You will see a lake that is drab and colorless compared to its previous years.