The Cordgrass Prairie

Where the boardwalk ends, you disembark onto a berm between the cordgrass prairie and the lake. If you’re not familiar with sand cordgrass, you will be by the end of this hike. It looks like something you’d see in landscaping, showy sprays of slender grass waving in unison in the breeze. When you see dozens of them swaying, it’s a marvelous sight. The trail provides some promontories from which to see the lake, then swings away from it to zigzag through a series of small oak hammocks that act like islands amid the brilliant white sand of the scrub.

At 0.7 mile you meet a cross-trail for the Piney Wood Loop at a jeep track, heading back towards the parking area. To continue along the perimeter of trails, keep going straight. Once off the prairie, the trail winds through a pine forest on the sands of the Lake Wales Ridge, with young slash pines, and rounds a edge of the prairie where tall, showy redroot grow in abundance. Follow the orange blazes through the pines to emerge into open scrub.