March 31st, 2006 Sandra Friend
Bald Rock, Cheaha State Park
…you can see forever. Or so it seemed from the top of Cheaha Mountain, Alabama’s highest point at over 2700 feet. Yes, folks, we’re not in Florida here: a side trail, if you will, a diversion for a good cause: a weekend spent with the Alabama Hiking Trail Society at their Annual Conference at Bald Rock Lodge, Cheaha State Park in north-central Alabama. These folks are doing their best to provide the citizens of Alabama with a network of hiking footpaths, and in doing so to connect the Florida Trail with the Appalachian Trail. The Pinhoti Trail, blazed with turkey tracks, passes through the park, so we had an opportunity on a guided outing to plunge down the side of the mountain from Bald Rock to Blue Mountain Shelter. I’m glad I brought my hiking stick. With no leaves on the trees, the views are incredible.
From the lodge, a broad boardwalk makes the view from the top accessible to all ages and abilities; as we plunged down the rugged Bald Point Trail, my knees felt the elevation loss and my brain kept saying ‘what goes down, must come up!’ Tiny white wildflowers and bluets peered from beneath the cover of oak, hickory, and beech leaves on the forest floor; a spring trickled across the trail. We reached the Pinhoti Trail after a half mile of sheer downhill, and continued downhill to a streambed to the access trail to the shelter. It’s much like an Appalachian Trail shelter, with a cooking shelf and two tiers of sleeping-plush stuff for backpackers! While I’m tempted to try the Pinhoti sometime, I couldn’t help but think of how varied the vegetation (not the elevation) would be in Florida on the same length of hike. I think I’ve gotten spoiled.
The Conference was well-attended and provided some excellent workshops, including a don’t-miss discussion of Alabama wildflowers by Carolyn Dean and the recounting of a PCT thru-hike by our own 500-miler Dan Bedore, who plans to finish off the Florida Trail in bits and pieces. The AHTS crowd is a solid group of hard-core trail builders and maintainers who are building on their dream; after five years, I’m pleased to see how well they are doing as an organization. Keep it up, guys!
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March 22nd, 2006 Sandra Friend
One of my favorite places to hike is the Ocala National Forest, so I suppose it is no coincidence that the very first long distance hiking trail in Florida took shape there back in 1966. On October 29, five members of the fledgling Florida Trail Association set foot on the entrance road at Clearwater Lake Recreation Area near Paisley and stenciled an “FT” on the pavement before proceeding north through the campground to blaze the state’s first serious hiking trail.
40 years and thousands of volunteers later, the Florida Trail stretches over 1,400 miles from the edge of the Everglades to Fort Pickens on Pensacola Beach. Designated a National Scenic Trail, it provides the best long distance hiking that the Sunshine State has to offer.
This past Sunday, I had the pleasure of walking with a few of the folks who didn’t know they were making history back in 1966 when they blazed the “Ocala Trail” : Jim Kern, founder of the Florida Trail Association; Tom Montoya, its second president; and Margaret Scruggs, its first office manager. It was an honor to walk with these pioneers of Florida hiking and make my own memories at this spot by chatting at length and listening to their stories of establishing the trail. Today’s Florida Trail isn’t in quite the same place — it moved closer to town — but when you head north from the Clearwater Lake trailhead and enter the cathedrals of longleaf pine where the wiregrass below forms a yellow haze to the horizon, you’ll understand why the Forest is a special place and how the Florida Trail connects you to it….and those who have gone before.
Take a hike! The Ocala section of the Florida Trail provides a continuous 72-mile backpacking experience which can be broken into long day hikes if you utilize the many trailheads and shuttle cars between them. The Clearwater Lake trailhead is just off CR 42 to the west of Paisley in Lake County; CR 42 runs between SR 44 in Deland and SR 19 in Altoona. The 10-mile segment between this trailhead and Alexander Springs Recreation Area (to the north) follows rolling sandhills topped with longleaf pine, dips through oak hammocks, and crosses boardwalks across jungle-like hydric hammocks. A blue blazed side trail leads to Alexander Springs. There is no charge for parking at the Clearwater Lake trailhead, but there is a per-person charge at Alexander Springs which can be circumvented by parking along the road shoulder at the trail crossing along CR 445A; look for the FNST signs.
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March 10th, 2006 Sandra Friend
The Big Scrub
The Ocala National Forest is one of my favorite places to hike, and Florida’s desert-like scrub is one of my favorite habitats along the trail. Coupled with a real need to get out and hike AND get some research done for my next book, this convergence led me to take a journey on the newest section of the Florida Trail, the Western Connector, this past weekend with two friends and colleagues.
The 23-mile Western Connector fills the missing link between the Cross Florida Greenway and the thru-trail in the Ocala National Forest. Roughly paralleling CR 314, it works its way north from the Ocklawaha River floodplain at Sharpes Ferry, passing through some large swamps before crossing CR 314A and Eaton Creek. My original plans were to start north from the new Eaton Creek trailhead off the road to the Hunters Education Youth Camp, but my friends convinced me that a slightly shorter hike would be more sensible, since none of us had done a serious day on the trail in some time. Leaving two of our cars at The 88 Store near Lake Kerr, we drove down to the CR 314 road crossing south of the gas transmission station and hiked north.
Florida Trail near Mud Lake
From the map, I’d expected the trail to weave in and out of the Ocklawaha River floodplain and rise up to the sandhills of longleaf pine and wiregrass so common to the northern part of the forest, but instead, after a brief jaunt into a lush hammock near Mud Lake, our new trail stuck to the heart of what the Ocala National Forest protects — the Big Scrub. This unique ecosystem is the largest scrub forest in the world, and along our nearly 10 miles of hiking, we experienced scrub in every one of its stages, from young, fluffy sand pines and diminutive oaks ideal for scrub-jay families to occupy, to ancient ready-to-collapse stands of toothpick-thin trees with trunks that clanked against each other in the breeze like an eerie bamboo symphony. We saw patches of Florida rosemary clustered under the pines and delicate trailside gardens of deer moss and reindeer lichen. The constant immersion in pine forest reminded me of a hike years ago on the Continental Divide Trail in Colorado, where the spruce forest went on forever, it seemed. So it is with the Big Scrub and the Western Connector (the northern half, that is…), the forest of sand pine a canvas of constant change and the trail a constant that links it all together.
Take a Hike! The Florida Trail’s new Western Connector is closed for construction between SR 40 and NE 145 AV, but you can hike it from that point north to the thru-trail connection, just 0.6 mile southeast of The 88 Store. The trailhead for this segment is along NE 170th Av, the access road to the Hunters Education Youth Camp. On the north end, access the connector by hiking south from The 88 Store and turning right at the trail junction sign. Be sure to ask permission to leave your car in their lot, and sign the hiker register!
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March 5th, 2006 Sandra Friend
Most Floridians have heard about the Big Tree: The Senator, the showpiece of Big Tree Park. Named for Senator M.O. Overstreet, who donated this massive cypress and the land around it to the people of Seminole County, the tree towers more than 129 feet tall, topped off from its former granduer by a hurricane in the 1920s.
While The Senator and his companion Lady Liberty are mighty impressive, they are but the tip of the discoveries you’ll make at Spring Hammock Preserve, a 1,500-acre natural area along the shores of Soldier Creek and Lake Jesup.
LEARN MORE >>> Take a Hike!
See the photos!
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