Sandra Friend - Five-Star Trails: Gainesville & Ocala: Your Guide to the Areas Most Beautiful Hikes

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Five-Star Trails Gainesville & Ocala

Your Guide to the Areas Most Beautiful Hikes

Copyright 2014 by Sandra Friend

All rights reserved

Published by Menasha Ridge Press

Distributed by Publishers Group West

Printed in the United States of America

First edition, first printing

Cover design and cartography: Scott McGrew

Text design: Annie Long

Cover photograph: Sandra Friend

Interior photographs: Sandra Friend and John Keatley

Author photograph: Janet Hensley

Indexer: Rich Carlson

Frontispiece: Wacahoota Forest (See , Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park: Wacahoota Trail .)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Friend, Sandra.

Five-star trails : Gainesville & Ocala : your guide to the areas most beautiful hikes / Sandra Friend, John Keatley. First edition.

pages cm. (Five-star trails)

ISBN 978-0-89732-614-8 (pbk.) eISBN 0-89732-615-5

1. HikingFloridaGainesville RegionGuidebooks. 2. HikingFloridaOcala RegionGuidebooks. 3. TrailsFloridaGainesville RegionGuidebooks. 4. TrailsFloridaOcala RegionGuidebooks. 5. Gainesville Region (Fla.)Guidebooks. 6. Ocala Region (Fla.)Guidebooks. I. Title.

GV199.42.F62G354 2013

796.510975979dc23

2013041713

Menasha Ridge Press

P.O. Box 43673

Birmingham, AL 35243

menasharidgepress.com

DISCLAIMER

This book is meant only as a guide to select trails in the Gainesville and Ocala area. This book does not guarantee hiker safety in any wayyou hike at your own risk. Neither Menasha Ridge Press nor Sandra Friend nor John Keatley is liable for property loss or damage, personal injury, or death that result in any way from accessing or hiking the trails described in the following pages. Please be especially cautious when walking in potentially hazardous terrains with, for example, steep inclines or drop-offs. Do not attempt to explore terrain that may be beyond your abilities. Please read carefully the introduction to this book as well as further safety information from other sources. Familiarize yourself with current weather reports and maps of the area you plan to visit (in addition to the maps provided in this guidebook). Be cognizant of park regulations and always follow them. Do not take chances.

Contents

Appendixes

Dedication

Honoring Kenneth Smith, whose vision and hard work for more than a decade led to a completed 30-mile segment of the Florida Trail spanning the Cross Florida Greenway, which will delight future hikers for generations to come.

Acknowledgments

Working as a team, we were able to tackle most of the trails for this book on our own, but we still had friends cheering us on and coming out to hike with us. Thanks to Ruth Lawler, Linda Taylor, and Marjorie Byron for walking the Florida Trail with us, and to Brickman Way, Bob Jones, and Brack Barker for their suggestions of best hikes in their own backyards. Our heartfelt appreciation goes to Joan and Philip Woods for allowing us to use their home as a base camp for several weeks while we juggled a family emergency with mornings spent hiking for this book. We appreciate the hospitality of Dennis Knight and Ruth and John Lawler for quiet stays in their respective cabins in the Ocala National Forest. Thanks, too, to Anna Mikell and Visit Gainesville for making us feel at home in Gainesville, finding us comfortable accommodations at the Sweetwater Branch Inn and the Best Western Gateway Grand when we werent camping on our own in the area. Our appreciation also goes out to Rick Ehle, David MacManus, and other members of the Florida Botany Facebook group for assisting with and confirming plant identifications. Thanks also to Greg Wiley of Marion County Parks and Recreation, Katharine Forbes at City of Gainesville Parks and Recreation, and Nels Parson at St. Johns Water Management District for their help. Finally, a tip of our hats to the many volunteers involved with Citizen Support Organizations, local volunteer programs, and the Florida Trail Association for keeping these trails open.

Preface

In the late 1960s, two young lives crossed paths in this region of bubbling springs and rolling hills. Sandras family visited every year, walking for hours around Silver Springs and Rainbow Springsbefore the days of theme parks, when they were nature-based attractions with boat rides and native animalsand visiting other natural features such as Paynes Prairie and Juniper Springs. Meanwhile, John had a 50-miler patch to earn as a Boy Scout, so he and the other members of his troop joined the Florida Trail Association and took a long backpacking trip across the Ocala National Forest. This immersion in natural Florida as youngsters stayed with us for a lifetime, shaping our interest in exploring the outdoors. We ran in different circles for decades but crossed paths at Florida Trail Association events, finally getting to know each other at the Big O Hike, the states longest-running group hike. Out of this friendship came a lot of hiking, finishing up Five Star Trails: Orlando together so we could head up to the Appalachian Trail to embark on fulfilling our respective lifelong dreams of an AT thru-hike. While we didnt make it all the way, three months on the trail solidified our partnershipand our relationship.

Sandras family moved to Ocala in the 1970s, and since then, when she wasnt living in the Orlando metro area or the mountains of western Pennsylvania, shes lived, worked, and hiked around Gainesville and Ocala. In the late 1990s, she worked with Kenneth Smith and Bob Jones building a new 30-mile section of the Florida Trail through Ocala on the Cross Florida Greenway and was honored to represent the hiking community by being among those cutting the green ribbon in 2001 to open the Land Bridge over I-75. For several years, she oversaw trail maintenance of the Pruitt section of the Florida Trail (), near her home.

With this deep background in local hiking to draw from, we had a lot of fun with research. While some of Sandras old favorites didnt make it into the book because the trails just werent five-star material anymore, we discovered new, amazing landscapes to share, like the vast prairies of Watermelon Pond (). Between the richness of the Ocala National Forest, the easy-to-reach hikes along the Cross Florida Greenway, and the wealth of new natural lands conserved around Gainesville over the past decade, we had more than enough places to explore.

Only 35 miles apart as I-75 flies, Gainesville and Ocala share many aspects of natural features and habitats formed from the mix of bedrock and soil throughout the region. Among these are karst featureskarst being limestone eroded over time by slightly acidic rainfallincluding sinkholes of all shapes and sizes, irregular limestone boulders and rocky bluffs, caverns, creeks that vanish into the earth, and springs. Hikes in this guide showcase many of the most spectacular karst features in the area, including the vast plain of Paynes Prairie. To the north of the prairie, Gainesville sits atop the southern edge of the ancient Northern Highlands of Florida, while to its south, the Central Highlands begin. Youll often hear locals refer to the region as North Central Florida, although its firmly to the northern part of the Florida peninsula. Atop the highlands are vast rolling hills that, in a few well-protected areas, are still topped with the longleaf pine and wiregrass savannas on which botanist William Bartram commented during his 1774 exploration of the region, as well as diminutive, desertlike scrub forests growing atop ancient sand dunes. Some of the northernmost hikes in this book feel positively Appalachian, with rugged landscapes and the same trees and wildflowers youd find in North Carolina; other hikes, such as the popular boardwalk between Juniper Springs and Fern Hammock Springs, or the walk through Marshall Swamp, are downright tropical in nature. Its a fascinating region, botanically and visually.