When winter’s chill wraps itself around the Florida peninsula, you know that hiking season has settled in, in earnest. Last night the temperatures dropped well below freezing throughout Central Florida, which can only mean one thing:  ding, dong the bugs are dead! No chiggers, no ticks, and none too many mosquitoes, either. I encourage you to get out and hike: the weather’s great!

I did this past weekend, having difficulty carving out time between holiday visits with family and friends and the multitude of writing projects on my plate at the moment. My friend Phyllis (aka Shortcut) started a Florida Trail thru-hike a couple years ago that got cut short, and I still have FT sections to fill. So we spent the holiday weekend filling in gaps for her and I: Gold Head Branch State Park and part of Etoniah Creek State Forest, with enough roadwalk inbetween to remind me how much I hate roadwalks and am willing to wait them out, since it seems silly to do them when you’re not backpacking. The weather was dicey, overcast the whole time, but I had the chance to take plenty of photos and try out my new digital recorder, so there will be a podcast or two in the future, soon as I find the time to mix ‘em. We saw plenty of deer and plenty of sinkholes, and in Gold Head, lots of fellow hikers. Hooray! So get out there and enjoy while the weather’s chill and you can knock out the miles on a section hike of the Florida Trail.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 6:55 am and is filed under Florida Trail, Hiking Tips, 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.