Okeechobee’s Last Wild Shore

 Following our leader into a tropical forest evocative of a stroll into The Jungle Book, we quickly lost sight of artificial Florida and entered its wild past. In year 24 of the Big O Hike, we’d opted to ignore the Herbert Hoover Dike, that man-made construct that girdles the second largest lake inside America’s borders. Instead, we turned to Lake Okeechobee’s ancient shoreline, the Okeechobee Ridge.

 While the trail we followed branches off the Florida Trail at Port Mayaca, the two trails have nothing in common other than a parking area next to the St. Lucie Canal and FTA volunteers that maintain the routes. The Rafael Sanchez Trail, as it is called to honor the landowner who preserved this narrow corridor of relict shoreline, does something that no other trail nearby does.

 It bobs. It weaves. It curves around naturally scoured waterways, now dry, and tunnels deeply through a tropical understory beneath massive cypress trees that once had the waters of Lake Okeechobee lapping at their roots.

 Even the fallen trees, the ancients, add a surreal touch to a scene that was commonplace until the early 1900s: the reality of South Florida, before it was ditched and diked and drained by the minions of the Internal Improvement Board, a quaint euphemism for government officials who sought to turn South Florida into a developer’s paradise.

 South Florida was a lush tropical jungle. You read of its beauty in the writings of botanists John Kunkel Small and Charles Torrey Simpson. Yet a hundred years later and billions of government dollars invested in “transforming” South Florida’s hydrology to suit the needs of agriculture and development, there is little of its natural complexion left.

 The Okeechobee Ridge is one of these rare places. When you walk this trail, despite its close proximity to US 441, you enter another world. It’s a world we ache for, a world denied our generation and all generations to come, since “conservation” wasn’t in the ethos of those who sought to flog South Florida to the highest bidder.

 These slivers of real Florida can’t counterbalance the permanent damage done. But we have them as reminders, bearing silent witness of Florida’s former glory.

Hike the Rafael Sanchez Trail