After hiking and backpacking for years in Pennsylvania, I moved back to Florida and immediately looked for someone to hike with in July. Well, surprise to me, hiking in Florida virtually shut down during the summer months. I bothered folks anyway and insisted on doing hikes of 4-12 miles during the summer months that year and the next until I finally saw the light. Summer hiking in Florida is not about covering distance! It’s about getting about briefly and enjoying the outdoors before the heat, sun, and hordes of insects get to you.

And thus it was this morning, National Trails Day, in Florida. Lots of outdoor activities celebrating trails, all pretty much held first thing in the morning and over by lunchtime. I joined my fellow hikers for an outing at Camp Crystal Lake, Keystone Heights (in Clay County, not that fictional Friday the 13th place), where we wandered off down the Florida Trail for an hour’s refresher on how it felt to be outdoors. And it felt good. We used one of the camp’s haywagon trails to make a shortcut to a large sinkhole pond and joined the Florida Trail there, wandering through oak hammock and upland forest before dropping down a deeply forested slope to cross a clear sand-bottomed creek. The waters burbled over a small set of rapids and flowed towards Crystal Lake, where our journey ended at an overlook. It was a short hike, but it reminded me of the connections between people and landscape and each other, the importance to get together and take a walk no matter the season, to refresh the mind with a dash of green.

Thanks to all who celebrated National Trails Day in their own way. Keep the spirit of hiking alive!

Take a Hike! Camp Crystal Lake is an Alachua County School District environmental education camp where a little more than 3 miles of the Florida Trail crosses the property. The trail crossing is near the camp entrance, which is east of SR 100, 4 miles north of Keystone Heights off Airpark Road. The trail leads east and west from the crossing; our journey took us east.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 3rd, 2006 at 5:09 pm and is filed under Florida Trail, North. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.