Hike Bike Paddle Camp Florida with authors Sandra Friend and John Keatley as your guides
Stretching from the Big Cypress Seminole Reservation to Lake Okeechobee, the Florida Trail Seminole section traverses a vast agricultural region, the former Everglades. Hiking is on roads and levees.
Set in a 60-acre cypress dome on the Big Cypress Seminole Reservation, the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki museum of Seminole culture provides an introduction to the tropical outdoors of natural South Florida’s swamps in which the Seminole Tribe has lived for more than a century.
With airboat and swamp buggy rides as well as interpretation of native species, Billie Swamp Safari is an attraction providing immersion into the Big Cypress Swamp, ancestral home of the Seminole Tribe since the 1800s..
Law enforcement findings confirms it not smart to camp along the Miami Canal in the Seminole section of the Florida Trail
On my first day on support crew, the group decided to try a slackpack day. So we were up early, much too early. The faster hikers wanted to get out on the trail by 5 AM. Slack packing would mean that we didn’t have to break camp at Big Cypress Campground, and the hikers wanted …
Leaving the wilds of the Big Cypress Swamp, the trail followed an old road for most of the distance. After a right hand turn on a large main road, I followed the blazes and other hikers footsteps. I stopped while crossing a canal to tend to a few hot spots on the bottom of both …
Returning to the Big Cypress Seminole Reservation for the first time in a decade, I remember my visits of the past and celebrate the present with John with a panther sighting.
How to order a copy of The Florida Trail: Florida’s National Scenic Trail, our limited edition full-color coffee table book that tells the comprehensive story of the first 50 years of routing, building, maintaining, and enjoying our statewide National Scenic Trail.
Walking through the most ancient of Florida’s forests, the feeling that landscape has a spirit persists, especially when contrasted with places where habitat has been permanently destroyed.
JK continues around Lake Okeechobee – a part of the trail he’s done before on the Big O Hike – as part of the support crew for the FT hikers new to the region.
It’s been over 10 years since I walked into Billie Swamp Safari and backpacked out of the reservation to Lake Okeechobee. With the announcement that the route of the Florida Trail would shift back to the original roadwalk I missed doing back then, and our plans to meet up with thru-hikers beyond the swamps, I …
