Hike Bike Paddle Camp Florida with authors Sandra Friend and John Keatley as your guides
Florida’s capital city, Tallahassee, is an outdoor town. Forested and hilly, it is surrounded by thousands of acres of natural lands just waiting for exploration.
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.
Noted for its botanical beauty, the Apalachicola National Forest is the largest National Forest in Florida, sweeping south and west of Tallahassee.
Lake Jackson Mounds is best known for being one of the largest ceremonial temple mound complexes in the Southeast, but it offers a cool, shady nature trail, too
A window into the watery world of the Woodville Karst Plain, Cherokee Sink is a large, deep water-filled sinkhole in a less-traveled section of Wakulla Springs State Park
Only seven acres in size, Dorothy B. Oven Park is a Tallahassee city park beloved by locals but little known outside the city, developed on a former nursery established by one of Florida’s earliest camellia growers.
Ancient magnolias, massive tulip poplars, and sinuous alluvial streams are all part of the delights of hiking the extensive loops at Tallahassee’s most expansive and wild urban park.
Elinor Klapp-Phipps Park in Tallahassee has the distinction of being a park inside city limits where you won’t feel a touch of city, its trails on sloping hillsides along Lake Jackson.
14.3 miles. Hugging the Big Bend coastline, this hike through Aucilla WMA and St. Marks NWR offers some of the most breathtaking panoramas you’ll find along the Florida Trail, and a profusion of wildlife.
77.9 miles. Florida’s largest national forest, Apalachicola is a very lush place, which means soggy feet and spectacular botanical diversity south of Tallahassee.
9 miles. Endearingly scenic, surprisingly rugged in places, and unlike any other piece of the Florida Trail statewide, this trek along the Aucilla River showcases some of Florida’s top natural features in one hike.
4.4 miles. Winding through a geologically weird and archaeologically significant part of Florida, the most fascinating segment of the Florida Trail is the Aucilla Sinks
116.2 miles. After crossing rural farms and forests in the Big Bend, the Florida Trail reveals the secrets of the Aucilla River before tracing the Gulf coastline at St. Marks NWR
