Exploring Lakeland’s Ridge

Walk past the picnic bench in the oak hammock to start your hike, following the orange blazes (and occasional orange signs with black arrows). Watch the blazes carefully, as unmarked cross-trails can make the path confusing in a few places. Sand pines and sand live oaks provide shade, and if you’re fortunate, you’ll see a family of Florida scrub-jays. Notice the numerous gopher tortoise burrows along the trail. Each gopher tortoise digs more than one (and sometimes as many as nine!) burrow, but only occupies one at a time. The remainder provide a virtual apartment complex for other sandhill and scrub species such as indigo snakes, oak toads, and eastern fence lizards.

Not quite halfway through the hike, the trail curves past a crowded forest of young longleaf pines. A bench at the halfway point provides a place to rest, and marks the transition between scrub and sandhill, as sand pines yield to turkey oak and muscadine grapevines. The loop trail ends just before the picnic bench.