Hike Bike Paddle Camp Florida with authors Sandra Friend and John Keatley as your guides
Explore the best places to tent camp in Florida without being far from your car
A former 5,000-acre cattle ranch in the midst of the Green Swamp Wilderness Area, headwaters to the Hillsborough, Peace, Ocklawaha, and Withlacoochee Rivers, Colt Creek State Park is a mosaic of wetlands and uplands with extensive forest roads serving as trails
Bring your binoculars for fall birding at Curry Hammock State Park, where migrating raptors cruise overhead by the hundreds following a major flyover route.
Centered around a mysterious 6,700-acre swamp forest with open waters and shrunken bald cypresses, Dead Lakes Recreation Area provides paddlers, hikers, and campers with a place to play.
E.G. Simmons Park in Ruskin offers a campground along with its beaches and mazy mangrove-lined waterways for paddlers and anglers along Tampa Bay.
In its 1.5 million acres sweeping across South Florida, Everglades National Park offers outdoor experiences ranging from accessible boardwalks and paved trails to rugged adventures in harsh wilderness.
Geology is the focus of Falling Waters State Park, which sits atop a tall ridge. The cascade plunges more than 70 feet into a cylindrical sinkhole lined with ferns and mosses, and the observation platform is about a third of the way down.
From Faver-Dykes State Park, you can easily explore the estuaries of the Matanzas River. Shaded by oak hammocks along Pellicer Creek, this peaceful park offers camping, hiking and biking trails, and some of the best paddling along this coast.
A dip into Florida’s only show cave at Florida Caverns State Park brings on an instant sense of cool. Opened in Marianna in the 1930s by the hardworking Civilian Conservation Corps, the tour route wraps through more than a dozen rooms with their own distinct and colorful landscapes.
Providing a 20.5 mile loop for backpacking amid open pine savannas and prairies, the Florida Trail at Bull Creek WMA is a popular destination.
A pleasant ramble on bluffs above the Withlacoochee River, the Croom River Trail segment of the Florida Trail tunnels through oak hammocks and slips around cypress swamps along its 6.3-mile journey.
6.9 miles. At the westernmost tip of Santa Rosa Island, the Florida Trail comes to its Northern Terminus in the shadow of the most important historic sites in Northwest Florida, Fort Pickens.
9.6 miles. Sweeping along the shoreline of one of the largest prairies in the Ocala National Forest, this section of the Florida Trail lingers on prairie panoramas.
