Stand at the north end of Cherry Grove Beach at low tide, where the sand curls around toward the inlet, and look across the water. What you see on the far side breaks every rule of the modern Grand Strand: no houses, no piers, no umbrellas for rent. Just dunes rolling back into dark maritime forest, a beach with nothing on it but bird tracks, and three miles of coastline that looks today more or less the way the whole coast looked three centuries ago.

That is Waties Island — spelled Waties after an early colonial trader, though half the maps and most of the search bars render it Waites — roughly 1,000 acres of untouched barrier island at the absolute northern tip of South Carolina, separated from the beach chairs of Cherry Grove by the narrow ribbon of Hog Inlet. It is one of the last undeveloped barrier islands in the state, reachable only by water, and for generations it has been North Myrtle Beach’s open secret: the wilderness next door.

It’s also, quietly, the subject of one of the most significant conservation stories in South Carolina. Over the past few years, a public-private effort has been assembling the island piece by piece with a stated destination that would change the Grand Strand map: a brand-new state park. This summer brought the latest milestone, a $4 million federal grant pushing the project another 107 acres forward.

Here’s the full story — what the island is, why it never got developed, where the state park effort actually stands, and how (and how not) to experience it in the meantime.

What — and Where — Is Waties Island?

Geographically, Waties Island is the final link in South Carolina’s chain of barrier islands — the last stretch of Palmetto State sand before Little River Inlet and the North Carolina line. It runs about three miles end to end, bounded by Hog Inlet and Cherry Grove to the south, the open Atlantic on its front, and a magnificent sprawl of salt marsh and tidal creeks behind, where the island shelters the mainland of Little River Neck.

Its roughly 1,000 acres hold a complete, intact barrier island ecosystem — the kind that coastal scientists cross states to study. A wide, unraked beach gives way to natural dune fields, which roll back into shrub thicket and genuine maritime forest, all of it wrapped in productive salt marsh. Nothing has ever been built on it beyond remnants of its farming and family past. No causeway was ever laid. When a hurricane pushes water across it, the island does what barrier islands are engineered by nature to do: it absorbs the blow, shifts its sands, and carries on protecting everything behind it.

That protective function isn’t abstract for North Myrtle Beach. Waties is the flood buffer, storm shield, and nursery ground for the waters that make the Cherry Grove marsh one of the liveliest estuaries on the Strand. The island most visitors never set foot on works around the clock for the town they’re standing in.

Why It Stayed Wild: A Century of Stewardship

Every undeveloped acre on this coast has a story about the development it refused, and Waties Island’s story runs through a single family. The Boyce family and their Tilghman forebears have owned portions of the island and the adjacent mainland for more than a century, holding it through every boom that transformed the beaches to the south — the postwar cottage era, the condo tower age, the golf course gold rush. Where nearly every comparable island became a gated community or a resort, Waties simply… didn’t.

The first great act of permanence came in 1995, when Anne Tilghman Boyce placed her share of the island into conservation and education, a landmark gift made in partnership with The Nature Conservancy and Coastal Carolina University. That land became the Anne Tilghman Boyce Coastal Reserve, and today Coastal Carolina owns roughly a third of the island through its educational foundation, using it as a living laboratory where marine science students study everything from dune dynamics to nesting sea turtles.

The remainder stayed in family hands — a jigsaw of parcels across the island, the marsh, and Little River Neck — which is where the modern chapter begins.

The State Park Question: Where Things Stand

Since 2022, the Open Space Institute — a national land conservation group — has been methodically acquiring the family-held pieces of the puzzle, working with the Boyce siblings, state agencies, and an alphabet of funding sources. The running total now exceeds 600 acres protected on and around the island, and the publicly stated end game is remarkable for a coastline this developed: a new South Carolina state park paired with a Heritage Trust Preserve, managed cooperatively by the state’s parks and natural resources agencies alongside Coastal Carolina University. It would be just the third state park on the Grand Strand, joining Myrtle Beach State Park and Huntington Beach State Park — and the first new one in generations.

The most recent milestone landed this July, when South Carolina received a $4 million grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration funding the acquisition of another 107 acres on and around the island — federal recognition of what conservationists have argued for decades about the island’s ecological value.

The honest caveat, and this article insists on it: no park exists yet. There is no visitor center, no ferry, no opening date, and no announced plan for what public access will ultimately look like. Land assembly of this complexity moves in years, not seasons — a lawsuit over ownership questions already stalled the effort for a year and a half early on before being dropped. Anyone who reads a headline and expects a ranger station on the beach next summer will be disappointed. What visitors can reasonably expect is that one of the wildest places on the South Carolina coast is being permanently locked away from development, with thoughtful public access as the long-term goal. On a coast where the default answer has always been more towers, that alone is front-page news.

The Conservation Timeline

How a wild island gets saved, one parcel at a time:

Visiting Today: The Right Way to See Waties

Until a park opens, Waties Island belongs to the tides, the turtles, and the visitors willing to earn it by water. No road or bridge reaches the island; the crossing is made by kayak, paddleboard, or small boat over Hog Inlet from Cherry Grove. Under South Carolina law the beach below the high-tide line is public, and respectful day visitors have long walked that magnificent, empty strand — but everything above it, the dunes and forest and marsh, is protected reserve and private conservation land, and it stays underfoot only in the sense that you admire it from the beach.

The wise first trip is a guided one. Great Escapes Kayak Expeditions runs regular paddling tours from the Cherry Grove area — a roughly four-hour round trip through the marsh creeks and across to the island, timed to the tides by guides who read Hog Inlet the way most of us read a menu. That local knowledge matters more than it may sound: the inlet’s currents are genuinely strong, the tide swings reshape the route, and an ill-timed solo paddle can turn a pleasure trip into a long, hard slog. Experienced paddlers who go on their own should plan around slack tide, file the classic float plan with someone onshore, and pack out every scrap they pack in.

The rules of the visit are the rules of every wild beach, enforced here by conscience and by the handful of researchers who share the sand: stay off the dunes, leave the shells with living residents inside them, give nesting birds and turtle crawls a wide berth, and take nothing but photographs and that particular calm that comes from standing on a beach with no buildings on it. During summer nesting season, that care doubles — the unbroken darkness of Waties is exactly why loggerheads still choose it.

The Wildlife: Who Actually Lives There

An undeveloped barrier island on a developed coast becomes an ark, and Waties plays the role fully. Loggerhead sea turtles haul out on its dark, quiet beach each summer to nest — one of the reasons the island’s undisturbed state carries such scientific weight. Bald eagles and ospreys work the inlets, great blue herons and egrets stalk the marsh, seaside sparrows nest in the spartina, and the sandbars host wheeling congregations of shorebirds that thin out to nearly nothing on busier beaches. Bottlenose dolphins patrol Hog Inlet closely enough that kayakers sometimes share the channel with them, and the unraked beach is legendary among local shellers — the best odds on the Strand of an unbroken sand dollar lie on sand no machine ever combs.

For visitors staying in Cherry Grove, the island’s wildlife spills generously across the inlet. The same marsh system feeds the herons you’ll watch from a channel-house dock and the fish you’ll catch off the Cherry Grove Pier; a stay on the north end of town is, ecologically speaking, a stay on Waties Island’s doorstep.

Cherry Grove: The Wild Island’s Front Porch

Every wilderness needs a gateway town, and Waties Island’s is Cherry Grove Beach — the northernmost section of North Myrtle Beach, where the kayak tours launch, the inlet views begin, and the beach walk north ends at the sight of that wild shoreline across the water. A stay here puts the island trip, the pier, the saltwater channels, and Boulineau’s provisioning runs all within a few blocks; an oceanfront home rental on the north end even puts Waties in your morning-coffee sightline. Couples planning a paddle-and-relax week do just as well in an oceanfront condo anywhere in town — from Ocean Drive, with Main Street’s restaurants for the post-adventure dinner, down through Crescent Beach and Windy Hill, the whole town sits within twenty minutes of the launch.

The island trip slots naturally into a fuller North Myrtle Beach itinerary — a wild morning to balance an evening at the shag clubs, a nature day between golf rounds, the story your family tells afterward when someone asks what you did at the beach. For the rest of the menu, our guides to things to do in Myrtle Beach and the area events calendar round out the week, and fall visitors — prime paddling season, with soft light and thin crowds — should see our guide to a fall vacation in North Myrtle Beach.

And when the state park story advances — the next acquisition, the management agreement, someday an opening plan — we’ll update this page. Few developments could mean more to the future character of North Myrtle Beach than its wild neighbor staying wild, officially and forever.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conservation details verified as of August 2026 via the Open Space Institute (openspaceinstitute.org), reporting from The Post and Courier and WMBF News, and Coastal Carolina University materials on the Anne Tilghman Boyce Coastal Reserve. The state park effort is ongoing and details may change; this page will be updated as the story develops. Related reading: our guide to Cherry Grove Beach and planning a fall vacation in North Myrtle Beach.