I launched Florida Hikes on Blogger as “A discussion on Florida’s hiking trails by Sandra Friend, author of numerous books on Florida hiking.” It wasn’t my first website.
It wasn’t even my first website related to my books.
Before I started writing hiking guides, I’d authored a series of earth science books for middle grade readers, a children’s picture book on Florida, a history for young readers on Florida during the Civil War, and a book on sinkholes, all published by major publishers. All prior to 2006. I created and eventually abandoned the websites I’d built to promote them all.
I also had a website for myself as an author, and another which shared the travel articles I owned the rights to and could syndicate. Back in that era, it was common for a freelance writer to research and write a single article and sell it to a dozen newspapers. I’d started doing so in 1995.
A court ruling in 1999 destroyed the way I and many other freelance writers made a living by changing the rules to benefit the newspapers. Now they could pay you once (offering no more than you’d gotten before) and share your article with all the newspapers their parent company owned.
As soon as that happened, many of newspapers I wrote for sent new contracts demanding all rights for new articles they’d already agreed to pay me for. And, retroactively, to every article of mine they’d ever published.
Except for the few willing to strike out those clauses, I stopped writing for newspapers. Instead, I focused on books and wrote for magazines and for public relations firms, and for new online markets.
Cultivating a relationship with Gorp.com by writing about Florida hiking, I was introduced to the editor of the 50 Hikes series by Countryman Press. That kicked off my shift to writing guidebooks. By 2006, I’d had seven hiking guides published.
But I hadn’t stopped hiking.
I was knocking off a section hike of the entire Florida Trail, and I was finding more new-to-me trails as I researched my travel guides. At the same time, trails I’d written about (especially the Florida Trail!) kept changing. None of the websites I was juggling seemed an appropriate place to talk about hiking.
That’s what led to Florida Hikes. Here’s what it looked like in the early years.
It did double duty at first, as I could share my personal accounts of hikes with groups (largely on the Florida Trail) as well as upcoming events along with the all-important updates to trails in my books. Within a year, I’d settled on the idea of making it a database of hiking trails in Florida, like a virtual book, with user contributions and ratings and an active forum.
Facebook wasn’t a thing, yet. MySpace was new and more a curiosity than a platform.
As social media became more prominent and my own time more limited, I cut out the Florida Hikes forum and re-focused on trail information. Five years on, I’d taken it through several changes in hosts and platforms, all the while being the sole person behind it all: webmaster, programmer, designer, researcher, writer. Not until John and I hiked the Appalachian Trail in 2012 did that shift.
Roughly seven years ago, I found a format and layout I was comfortable with maintaining. At the same time, I removed our travel articles that had nothing to do with Florida and put them in a new website, Trails and Travel.
Five and a half years ago, we experimented with assigning articles to freelancers. One of our contributors who began writing for us that summer, Chris Stevens, continues to keep us supplied with a steady stream of new places across Florida to hike.
Assisting with ongoing updates to The Florida Trail Guide and FarOut apps, he’s become my co-author, too.
Like John and I, Chris and his wife Chelsey are always looking for interesting trails to hike while they travel. Inviting Chris to co-author the new edition of Hiker’s Guide to the Sunshine State with me gave us all an excuse to scour the state for new-to-us places to hike, and boy, has that given us a backlog to share with you.
Thanks to those who participated in our month-long contest in February. You are still welcome to follow along to find new places to hike! Subscribe on any page on this site to get a weekly recap of new and interesting trails. Or discover our finds outside of Florida on our sister site at TrailsandTravel.com.
- Michael Crotty Bicentennial Park - November 3, 2026
- A.J. Henry Park - November 1, 2026
- Okeeheelee Nature Center Trails - October 22, 2026