The marsh doesn’t ask permission; it spreads and breathes and pulls the tide in and out on its own schedule, indifferent to whoever stands at the helm. Courtney Hutson, the founder of Golden Girls Outdoors, has known this since she was a girl, kayaking out to a then-vacant Daniel Island with her father, combing the pluff mud for shark teeth.
Her father’s Navy career moved the family 11 times before Hutson turned 11, eventually landing in Mount Pleasant, where she met her now-husband, Jim Hutson, a local fishing guide. They started dating the summer after their senior year of high school, and the water was their sanctuary. “All day, every day, we were on the boat, exploring, camping, fishing,” she recalls.
At the College of Charleston, Hutson received a degree in biology and joined Barrier Island Ecotours as an intern and then a naturalist and captain for 16 years, earning her US Coast Guard master captain’s license. Hutson guided thousands of children and adults through the salt marsh, teaching them that the marsh itself is infrastructure, acting as a natural sponge between each storm and every home behind it. “It showed me how irreplaceable our ecosystem is,” she explains, “and even locals loved learning new things on our excursions.”…