Hike Bike Paddle Camp Florida with authors Sandra Friend and John Keatley as your guides
Sites along the Great Florida Birding Trail, and other parks and trails where birding is superb. For the don’t-miss locations, see Best Birding.
A community park in Welaka, 40 Acre Park is a great stop for birding, with little-used trails that ramble around a series of wetlands once used in the fish hatchery.
Paved trails wind through the woods at A.D. Barnes Park, a Miami city park, where a tiny slice of native pine rocklands survives in one corner along with large trees.
Along busy US 19 in Tarpon Springs, hugs the western shore of Lake Tarpon, offering plenty of picnic pavilions along a boardwalk following the cypress-lined shore.
Alderman’s Ford Nature Preserve offers a surprising treat for a Central Florida hike: whitewater, showcasing the Alafia River churning as it winds through a deeply eroded channel
Alfred A. Ring Park features a dense slope forest along Hogtown Creek with old-growth trees and rare wildflowers along Appalachian-style ravines, a scenic hike.
In late winter, azaleas create ribbons of bright color beneath the live oak canopy across the grounds of Maclay Gardens, a series of formal gardens along the hillsides sweeping down to Lake Hall.
Part of Charlotte Harbor Preserve State Park, Alligator Creek has two loop trails where freshwater and saltwater habitats meet, enabling you to explore a variety of coastal habitats in less than three miles.
In the city once called Alligator, first home of the University of Florida and named for a great chief of the Seminoles, Alligator Lake has long been a gathering place. Established as a park in 2002, hiking and bicycling are now its primary focus.
At Amberjack Environmental Park, a surprising collision of scrub and mangrove habitats occurs in Rotunda in the Cape Haze peninsula of Charlotte County.
A sweep of Atlantic Coast beach awaits along the southern tip of Amelia Island, where the sand glistens and the surf is frequently up. Amelia Island State Park protects 200 acres along the island’s shore.
Anastasia State Park is windswept and sandy, with an arc of beach that stretches four miles to Matanzas Inlet, curving in on itself to face the ancient city of St. Augustine.
At Anastasia State Park in St. Augustine, the Ancient Dunes Trail leads you on a short scramble up and over relict dunes deeply shaded by ancient live oaks
