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.
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 Preserve offers a surprising treat for a Central Florida hike: whitewater, showcasing the Alafia River churning as it winds through a deeply eroded channel
Featuring a dense slope forest along Hogtown Creek with old-growth trees and rare wildflowers along Appalachian-style ravines, this is a scenic hike in the heart of Gainesville
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.
A walk in the uplands of Highlands Hammock State Park, this 0.6-mile nature trail features dry habitat succession from flatwoods to scrub
At Charlotte Harbor Environmental Center, Alligator Creek Preserve offers two gentle loop trails where freshwater and saltwater habitats meet
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 in Rotonda, a surprising meld of scrub and mangrove habitats means great birding along the high ground of the Cape Haze Peninsula
The thud of horse’s hooves on sand makes for a unique experience at Amelia Island State Park, the only Florida State Park where you can ride horses on the beach
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.
