Florida Trail
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Flora, Fungi, and Fauna along the Florida Trail in Bronson State Forest
Let’s wrap up my Florida trip with this final post from my hike at Bronson State Forest. Sand Heath, Ceratiola ericoides Rosemary scrub habitats in Florida are considered to be a particularly endangered habitat. It thrives in sandy, old inland dune habitats and prefers to have a good burn once in a while—and well, you can imagine that sandy habitats and burning can be in short supply when people build homes right on top of and up next to the perfect habitat. A few sites with more information: Scrub Rosemary via UCF Arboretum, Endemic Florida Rosemary via Florida State Parks, and Rosemary scrub via Florida Hikes. Deer Moss, Cladonia evansii…
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A Hike in the Chuluota Wilderness | Florida Trail
On the Sunday of the short weekend in Florida, I went on a hike with Sandra of Florida Hikes and Kate Dolamore, an artist friend in central Florida I’ve gotten to know the last couple of years. I wanted to hike on a section of the Florida Trail that was new to me, a piece in the Bronson State Forest that was in the process of being re-routed when we hiked in 2011. During our hike we had to road walk a large chunk of this section. So, after breakfast with some of the crew from Billy Goat Day at the Townhouse Restaurant, I met up with Sandra at the…
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Scenes from Billy Goat Day 2020
View this post on Instagram The FTthruHIKE community continues to grow. And more and more hikers are thru-hiking every year! If you haven’t considered a winter thru-hike of the Florida National Scenic Trail you should! These people are just one of the reasons! . . #thruhiker #thruhiking #hikertrash #travel #nature #adventure #wanderlust #photooftheday #picoftheday #keepitwild #backpacking #hiking #thruhiking #florida #ftthruhike #floridatrail #nature #sunrise #sunset #hikertrash #adventure #camping #getoutside #florida #floridabackpacking #backpacker #travel #at2020 #pct2020 #cdt2020 #jewelofthetriplecrown A post shared by FTthruHike (@ftthruhike) on Jan 29, 2020 at 5:28am PST First, I’m going to share the photo from FT ThruHike comparing the group in 2014 versus this year’s group. To recap for…
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Billy Goat Day – A Quick Synopsis
Photo from Florida Hikes via Flickr – To find me, look for the dog in the lower left corner, then the guy in the yellow shirt, and then the grey and orange FT Thru-Hike shirt just to the right of that. It was a good crowd! Wow, what a weekend! I flew into Florida very early on Friday morning, landing at around 10:45am local time, stood in line for my rental car, and then jettisoned myself to the nearest Publix to get lunch. I’d started craving a Publix sub the night before but had been thinking about it for weeks. The particular Publix I found was very busy at the…
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10 Years Ago – Ocean to Lake Trail Hike
It suddenly hit me about a month ago that we’re wrapping up a decade here in a few weeks. To be honest, and I’ll elaborate more on it in my end-of-decade post later in December, my brain is still stuck somewhere in 2014-2016. It hasn’t caught up to 2019 yet. And then I realized that this Thanksgiving week is our 10th anniversary of our hike of the Ocean to Lake Trail, a side trail of the Florida Trail. Typically most people start on the eastern shore of Lake Okeechobee and then walk to the Atlantic Ocean on Jupiter Island at Hobe Sound Beach. We did this as a prep for…
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The 88 Store & The Florida Trail
After we left Astor Park and from visiting the Bartram Tree we continued west down SR 40 through Ocala National Forest. We had thought about going down to Alexander Springs at first but with the rain showers it didn’t seem like an ideal thing to do. Instead, Chris looked at the GPS and opted to head north on SR 19 towards Salt Springs into a part of the of the forest we hadn’t driven through before. Well, we’d been on a bit of it before, when we’d been transported from the end of the Juniper Springs Run at the Juniper Take-Out in 2009 when we’d paddled the Juniper Run. And…
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Being a Trail Advocate from Afar | Florida Trail
A few days ago I received the fall issue of Footprint, the magazine of the Florida Trail Association. It was a big issue, at least to me, one where the call to protect to the trail and be a trail advocate was once again in the spotlight. The trail recently celebrated its 50th anniversary with a celebration at the first blaze in Ocala National Forest and the placement of a plaque to commemorate the historic blaze that began the Florida National Scenic Trail. In addition last year, a new monument at the northern terminus at Fort Pickens was erected. Two very exciting events! This post is being published today on…
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A Few Random Backpacking/Long Trail Thoughts
I often write in my head and many things never make it out into the internet. However, I have had a few backpacking and long distance trail thoughts building up over the summer that I think about and then forget, but I think I’ve got enough of them now to do a random list-style post. Here we go… Last fall Geraldine Largay’s, trail name Inchworm, body was found after having been missing for over two years after getting lost on the Appalachian Trail in Maine. When news broke in 2013 the she was lost it was easy to suspect foul play based on all of the circumstances. At the very…
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5 Years Ago | Starting the Florida Trail
It probably helps that Chris and I went to Florida two years ago, when I was just transitioning from my first trimester to the second, but it certainly doesn’t feel as if it has been five years since we left Loop Road and hiked through Florida. It doesn’t seem like nearly six years ago since we moved out of the state. You know those bumper stickers that you see in Texas sometimes that say, “I wasn’t born in Texas, but I got here as fast as I could”? Well, that would be me for Florida. And if it weren’t for family we’d probably still be there. The Florida Trail is…
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Help the Florida Trail
The Florida Trail has had some hardships in recent years, some I touched on in this post, but more recently a large swath of land in the panhandle is for sale and the Florida Trail was kicked off of this land and rerouted through a roadwalk. Unless anyone has several million dollars to faciliate a corridor being accessed through there, or better yet whatever billion it’ll take to buy the whole area outright (come on, let’s make another National Forest!), for the current short-term outlook the Florida Trail won’t be going through this area. Since the option of really helping that area out isn’t going to be something I or…