I’m in just my underwear, up to my chest in very cold black water, the sound of a big fast gun is going off extremely close to me as the sun is going down and I’m quickly realizing this is not a situation I am prepared for. Flotillas of fire ants are clinging to each other drifting around and panicking in the wake I am throwing as I fumble around over logs and vines that are hidden beneath the tea colored water. Yes I’m on the Florida Trail, I know this because I can see the blazes further down from where I am almost swimming and the orange reflectors are nearly underwater themselves.
I bobbed out of the swamp that the Aucilla river had created in it’s recent flood, put my clothes back and turned back around the way I came, back to a forest road, occasionally lifting my heavy backpack with a skateboard attached to it above my shoulders so that it wouldn’t touch the belly high water that had inundated the trail.
When I look back at situations like this one I laugh, it’s one of those things you would never do on purpose to yourself. The agony of pleasurable suffering is what makes backpacking worth the struggle, an acquired form of torture sometimes expected but often a surprise to hikers. Florida and the idea of hiking in it are not something that go hand in hand for obvious reasons. Being a native of this state, I long ago gave up defending stereotypes. Yes there are alligators literally everywhere, mosquitoes also everywhere. Further inland from the beaches you’ll find yourself in the “old south’’ Confederate battle flags, loose dogs, and raised trucks.
Walking out of another flooded section of the trail I met a hunter who told me “your lucky to be alive right now, I had my finger on the trigger ready to shoot you until I saw you were a dude, you got to wear more color.” I hiked the whole trail in a bright orange hoodie. I found it interesting that the Florida Trail is a project based on returning wild land back to the public to enjoy and is entirely volunteer maintained. Often hikers share what I call “gun parks” on the trail with hunters, places where you can easily spot dozens of Floridians with shotguns and huge sidearms wearing camouflage jumpsuits and followed by troops of skinny bloodhounds and pitbulls. The familiar sound of gun fire becomes as normal as the whooping of a blue heron or the buzzing of insects. I met many unconcerned hikers who told me it wasn’t hunting season, but they didn’t realize it’s legal to shoot wild boar all year round, another lurking danger of the trail. Often you could find hulking carcasses left for dead on the sides of the road, hunted as an invasive species. I’ve been saying that the Florida trail is like the Death Metal of hiking, it’s not unusual to see heaps of boned out deer bodies or having to shoo away vultures blocking your path as they chew carrion from some smashed up critter. We even found a massive alligator with its’ head split open by a semi-truck on the shoulder of the road, an awesome opportunity for a photo op.
So much of the FT is unconventional by thru-hiker standards. The trail does a massive figure eight around Orlando and Lake Okeechobee, as well as including a couple of side trails. I never needed more than a couple days of food at a time as convenience stores were bountiful, almost eliminating the need to filter water as well. Some say a third of the FT is road or bike trail. This created a new element for me as a hiker and inspired me to bring my skateboard for the entirety of the 1,100 mile “walk”. It’s a trail infamous for tedious road sections, a huge turn off for many thru-hikers, but also an opportunity to try something unconventional.
Ultralight be damned! My skateboard sat up top my backpack weighing 5.2 pounds, often pinching me between cypress trees and tangling itself up in vines and blowdowns. The few hikers I encountered chided me asking “how’s that going for you?” or pondered if I was some sort of transient lost on the backroads. I admit there were times when even I was unsure if I was just a lonely thru-hiker or another vagabond wandering from gas station to gas station. I hiked along side a fellow who had started North from Key West with just a Jansport backpack and two full sized pillows under his arms and shared a drink behind a gas station with Critter, a skinny hobo who was pushing a shopping cart from West Palm Beach across the state to Tampa with his dog, Buddy. He was kind enough to offer me some huge knives which I politely refused.
Despite all it’s oddities it was easy to become immersed in the Florida beauty. Ancient live oaks defied gravity and wound branches down into the ground and back up again. Cypress domes loomed like mountains on the prairie, and then transitioned into forests of palm trees or sandy embankments next to porous limestone cliffs overlooking lazy rivers. Reindeer moss was laid down like carpet on the ground, Spanish moss and air plants shared life with almost every tree insight. Crystal clear blue spring water gushed out of underwater caves and snow white sand as soft as baby powder along remote beaches tempt you to swim on occasion. What Florida lacks in altitude, it makes it up with vast skyline. Evening after evening you could watch sunsets that would last hours constantly in flux with every color. I skated by in awe of the power of Hurricane Michael, seeing entire forests of pine trees snapped like matchsticks for a hundred miles. It’s hard to describe some of the storm damage I encountered, an entire tin roof wrapped around a tall pine tree, messes of old trailers warped and strewn about abstractly.
It’s easy to say that a trail such as this is uncomfortable. It’s even easier to know that the Florida trail knows no equivalent, but it’s extremely gratifying to be hiking in the off season knowing the rest of the country is covered in snow. In many ways it felt like the culmination of all my hiking experiences finally converging. The community of people crazy enough to attempt this swampy, snake filled state is mostly made up of already accomplished backpackers. It was a pleasure to run into hikers I had met on previous trails or to find out you had a mutual friend or shared experience from a past trail. Some real heads are hiking here between seasons and experiencing a place so unique in America. It’s too soon to know if I would ever have the stones to do this trail again end to end, but I’m confident that I would come back for more Death Metal, cleaning up the sections that were not part of this thru-hike. Starting from the Keys, although it’s not part of the trail, seems like an obvious place to start for would be ECT hikers and chipping off the Blackwater section in the panhandle could potentially roll previous hikes into one gigantic journey up or down the East Coast. I recommend the Florida Trail to anyone wanting a challenging thru hike unlike anything else. Just be ready to hop over cottonmouths.
Check out the interview I gave on Trail Tales Podcast about the Florida Trail as well.
