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Jones Lake State Park
Jones Lake State Park has two of the Carolina Bay lakes found in eastern North Carolina, though you need a permit to visit Salters Lake.
The primary activities at Jones Lake, at least on the last weekend in May 2008, are swimming and picnicking. The park provides a white-sand beach on a designated swimming area in the tannin-brown lake that is open from Memorial Day through Labor Day. There’s a small fee to swim.
A bathhouse and concessions stand are available, and the park rents canoes and pedal boats.
A watersnake found that a black plastic floating dock under the boat shed was a good place to warm itself. A lifeguard said they killed a chicken snake (corn snake) in the boat shed’s rafters a week earlier.
The 5-mile Bay Trail circles the lake and has side trails to a fishing pier and to Salters Lake (park map). The state’s Web page for the park says the trail leads you through dense vegetation and over boggy soil, and to views of large pond cypress trees draped with Spanish moss along the shore and leatherwood plants with delicate white flowers, also called “titi,” overhanging the water’s edge. There’s also a 1-mile looping trail.
Note the pier in this photo of the lake.
Exhibits inside the visitors center explain southeastern North Carolina’s “Carolina Bays” phenomenon.
A small butterfly garden next to the visitors center is a success.
Jones Lake is in Bladen County off of N.C. 53 near White Oak, in the western corner of Bladen Lakes State Forest. Click on the map for a larger version.
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