Two Directions From the Gate: What Fall Actually Looks Like for Spring Forest

Leave Spring Forest's entrance on Highway 17 Bypass and turn south, and within fifteen minutes you're walking sand paths through 2,500 acres of maritime forest and salt marsh, with a Moorish-style castle rising out of the dunes. Turn north instead, and in about twenty you're standing on a boardwalk over the water with steel drums drifting out of one restaurant and fry oil out of the next. Same gate. Same fifteen-minute window. Two completely different Saturdays.

Most guides to "things to do near Murrells Inlet" flatten that into one list, as if Huntington Beach State Park and the MarshWalk were interchangeable stops on the same itinerary. They aren't, and this fall makes the difference obvious. Spring Forest sits close enough to both that residents don't have to pick a lane for the season. This year, both directions are firing marquee events within about six weeks of each other, and that overlap is worth understanding before you plan your October and November.

South: The One Weekend the Park Gets Loud

Huntington Beach State Park is normally the quiet option. Three miles of uncrowded beach, freshwater lake trails where you're as likely to spot an alligator as a heron, and the Atalaya ruins sitting empty most of the year. That changes for one weekend at the end of September.

The Atalaya Arts and Crafts Festival runs September 25 through 27 this year, staged in and around the castle itself. More than a hundred juried artisans set up for the weekend, alongside local food vendors and musicians, with Brookgreen Gardens sponsoring the event as it has for decades. Admission is ten dollars for adults, free for anyone fifteen and under, and it's cash or card at the gate rather than something you can pre-buy. If you're a Spring Forest resident who's driven past Atalaya a hundred times without ever going inside, this is the weekend the building actually has a reason to be full.

One practical note for anyone planning to go: the park's Nature Center Marsh Boardwalk is currently closed for ongoing construction, so if you're used to that particular loop, plan a different route through the grounds. Parking also fills fast during the festival, so arriving before mid-morning or after the early afternoon crowd thins out is the better bet.

North: A New Tenant on a Restless Corner

The MarshWalk side of the ledger has had more turnover this year. The building at 4139 US-17 Business, right along the boardwalk, spent about a year as Sloppy Jose's Cantina before closing in early 2026. It's now Inlet Shipwreck Bar & Grill, which opened February 25 with a pirate theme, an all-day happy hour, and live music most nights, according to the Myrtle Beach Sun News. The property already had a pirate-ship playground for kids, which the new owners kept, and there's a signature Pirate Punch on the drink menu if you want to know what the fuss is about.

It sits close enough to Wicked Tuna that you could walk between the two without much effort, which is worth knowing if you're the kind of resident who likes to compare a new spot against an established one on the same evening.

Down the strip, Drunken Jack's is adding something smaller but more of a routine: Thursday Night Team Trivia starts September 17. If you've eaten there for years and never stayed past dinner, this is the kind of low-key addition that turns a restaurant into a weekly habit instead of an occasional stop.

The Six-Week Run Toward the Holidays

Once the Atalaya Festival wraps in late September, the calendar shifts almost entirely to the MarshWalk side, and it doesn't let up until December. Here's what's actually on the books:

• October 17 — Grand Strand Witches' Night, an annual Halloween crawl along the MarshWalk benefiting the Children's Recovery Center. Costumes welcome.
• October 31 — Halloween on the MarshWalk, the boardwalk's longest-running annual event, with all eight MarshWalk restaurants running food and drink specials for the night.
• November 7 — The Murrells Inlet Oyster Roast in the Wicked Tuna parking lot, an all-you-can-eat spread with live music and local craft vendors.
• All of December — MarshWalk Wonderland of Lights, a walk-through holiday light display along the water.

That's four distinct events in roughly seven weeks, all within a twenty-minute drive of Spring Forest, all clustered on the same stretch of boardwalk. For a resident who wants an active fall without much driving, that density is the actual story. It's not that Murrells Inlet has "things to do." It's that this particular season stacked its two best drives so close together that skipping either one means skipping half of what fall looks like from this address.

Why the Two Directions Matter More Than the Individual Events

None of this is unique to fall 2026 in the sense that these events won't happen again next year. What's worth noticing is the pattern itself. Spring Forest isn't a beachfront community that only points toward the water, and it isn't tucked so far inland that the state park feels like a day trip. It sits at the hinge, with Tidelands Waccamaw Community Hospital and everyday shopping close by in either direction, which is part of why residents who tour the neighborhood tend to stop looking elsewhere the same day.

That positioning is easy to overlook when you're comparing HOA fees or square footage on a listing sheet. It shows up in ordinary weeks, in whether a Tuesday errand run also lets you catch a glimpse of the marsh, or whether a Saturday festival requires real planning versus a short drive you can decide on that morning. This fall, that difference is doing a lot of work. The quiet side and the loud side both have something worth showing up for, and neither one asks you to give up much time to get there.

If you've lived in Spring Forest a while, none of this replaces your own sense of the neighborhood. But if you've been meaning to finally walk through Atalaya, or you've wondered what replaced Sloppy Jose's, this is the season those questions get answered without much effort.

For residents who've been here long enough to remember when the boardwalk looked different, or newer neighbors still learning which direction to turn on a Friday night, Brendan Danna is always glad to talk through what's changing in the neighborhoods he knows best. Let's Connect if there's ever a question about the area worth asking.