Belzoni, Mississippi: EZ Access Swamp Stump

I live right down the road from Sky Lake boardwalk. I was here when they first started building this place -- it was donated by the late Mark Simmons to be preserved for everyone to see a historical landmark. It's a great experience for all ages to see trees of this magnitude that have been around since the beginning of time.

I would say this is more than a stump. The tree is still living and had a lot of green limbs up towards the top.

The bald cypress is a relative of the redwoods and sequoias, so they are massive trees. The really big ones can be 15 feet in diameter. Unfortunately, it's tough to see a ginormous bald cypress because many of them were chopped down for lumber a century ago, and what's left are in the middle of wet, icky swamps. The State of Mississippi has come to the rescue by building the three-quarter-mile-long Sky Lake Boardwalk, which takes you deep into a swamp while leaving you high and dry. At the end of the boardwalk is really big bald cypress tree stump, perhaps one of the largest in the world. Lest you feel cheated at just seeing a big stump, along the boardwalk are many other fine examples of non-stump gigantic bald cypress trees.