Florida Trail: Day 28
Feb 3, 2022
Mile: 167.0 to 189.8 (22.8 miles)
Start: Yates Marsh South Campsite, Kissimmee River, FL
Finish: Oak Creek South Campsite, Kissimmee River, FL
All night the stupid raccoons and wild pigs and armadillos ran around our campsite, tearing up the ground, messing with the water bottles that a Trail Angel had left and generally just causing a ruckus. At this point in the trail it seems like there’s so much wildlife that we just don’t even worry a whole lot about the critters bothering our tent. It’s now become Standard Operating Procedure to hang our food from a tree at night because we’d rather have a 25lb raccoon go after that instead of chewing through our tent. The noises of the smaller critters running around were almost comforting because I’d rather have them scurrying and snuffling around versus the forest going silent from a big predator in the area like a panther.
The animals generally left our tent alone but all night it sounded like we were living in a zoo. Coyotes howled, dogs barked, cows mooed, donkeys brayed, raccoons chittered and the wild pigs snorted and snuffled. Even the armadillos were crunching and rustling in the brush.
When we woke in the morning, we filtered water from the pump at camp and found that it was next to some electric purple beautyberries which I was really excited about. I have never seen beautyberries in the wild but I have my foraging books saved to my phone and properly identified the berries before eating them. They are fluorescent fuchsia and quite pretty with their bunched up berry clusters clinging along a woody stem. We found out their leaves when crushed will protect you against mosquitoes! The flavor of the beautyberries were very interesting like an electric blue flavored ice pop and we chowed down on a couple. Of all the wild foraged foods we’ve found, they were definitely some of the prettiest but the taste was not our favorite.
We ate a quick breakfast of oatmeal and granola and then headed out back to the trail where we waved to our fellow Yates Marsh South campers who were an older couple they had driven in with their car to the tent site. They had two small dogs who sat obediently in their laps and we chatted with them about the Florida Trail. They told us about how up ahead there is an enormous alligator in the pond and to be careful. We walked a few minutes north and sure enough spied a 12-foot-long mama gator who we named Chunk (short for Chunkimus Prime) was sunbathing on the shores. When Shannon first saw the gator, he mistook her black rubbery tail for a giant truck tire. Her humongous tail arched and whipped out of the water, her eyes beating down on us as we watched her nervously from the trail. We didn’t linger too long or get too close to the water as we didn’t know if she had baby gators with her and didn’t wanna stick around to find out.
We hiked down the road when the trail eventually entered cow pasture where dozens of mama and baby cows scattered as we walked through the fields dodging massive piles of cow pies. The cattle were uneasy and we were a little bit nervous to see if the cows would stampede us or not. Almost all of the cattle scattered as we trekked through the pasture except for one cow who wasn’t moving and was sizing us up intensely. I laughed at this one cow, elbowing Shannon telling him that this one mama cow was probably not the smartest. Shannon wasn’t laughing and replied that this was no mama cow because this one had cojones that dropped down almost to his knees. It was a massive bull who was very angry looking that we were interrupting his “mingling with the ladies” time. I gulped as the bull snorted and we got the heck out of there, ensuring that we didn’t make direct eye contact with the massive testosterone fueled animal.
After causing a few small cattle stampedes, the trail left the pastureland crossing onto the road where we dodged some construction and headed out into the woods again. The trail climbed over a livestock fence on an old wooden ladder and we hiked through some nice marshlands, prairies and forest. Then we were spit back on the hot road again for 2 miles of road walking until we hit a busy country highway. Massive trucks tumbled by carrying timber and oranges.
We stopped at a hiker-friendly church about 8 miles in where we were able to sit around the back of the church, stretching out in the shade on cool marble tile. It felt like a relief to refill our drinking water straight from the faucet and plugged in our phone and backup batteries to charge in an outdoor outlet. The neighborhood dog barked at us for a while and then would forget about us before seeing us again and be like, “Oh yeah I should probably bark at those weird hiker people.” But otherwise it was a nice lunch and I felt like we could’ve rested there at the church for a while. Unfortunately we still had about 15 miles to go and headed down the busy highway dodging 18-wheelers, a couple of dead raccoons, some dead fish dropped by ospreys and more dead raccoons. We looked down over the highway bridge at one point and spotted a very nice looking alligator sunbathing amongst the cypress strand. The knobby knees of the cypress trees jetted out over the still black water that probably hid many other alligators we couldn’t see.
It was a great relief to head back up over another wooden fence, this one was kind of sketchy and leaning slightly to the left. Maybe we had hit the buffet too hard in the town of Okeechobee but this turnstile did not feel like it would support too many hikers after us and we definitely will let the Florida Trail Association maintenance team know to check out the structural integrity.
The next section of trail was challenging because it was a newer section bordering private land and cattle pasture. We slogged through a wet marsh with 6-foot-tall grasses that made it difficult to see where the orange blazes were. At one point we found ourselves up to our calves in swamp water but smiled at the tiny silvery fish scattering ahead of us in the clear pools. Despite having wet feet again, it was hard to not admire the beauty of the cypress dome which we thought we had escaped after the Big Cypress Swamp. Our feet were muddy and wet but it felt good in the thick heat of the humid afternoon. The trail wound through grasses taller than our head and game paths crisscrossed the Florida Trail making it very difficult to navigate. There were many times this afternoon we had to stop, look around and backtrack to find the orange blazers as the trail was not easy to follow. I’m sure glad there were two of us to see the trail from different perspectives and that we have GPS and paper maps just in case.
After the tall grass section where we lost the trail a bunch, we then traversed through mazes of ancient live oaks draped in Spanish Moss. Then we entered into this really amazing section of the trail where it was nothing but thick, jungly and dramatic palmettos. The forest was almost entirely cabbage palms which are used to thatch the roofs of traditional chickee huts the Miccosukee and Seminole tribes. It was a dark, cool and sandy trail underfoot and with all the twists and turns, you really had to pay attention to the path ahead of you. It felt like we were inside a cathedral with palms towering everywhere, beams of soft light filtering in and it was quiet and beautiful in its own way. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a place like this and it reminded me of walking through the incredibly ornate and opulent Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona.
As we were twisting and turning through the dense palm forest, we heard some grunting and crashing in the brush. It was a family of wild pigs! We caught the tail end of a wild pig party where the 70lb pig parents ran ahead to escape us as the little herd of little baby pigs trailed not too far, behind squealing and snorting with their nubby legs churning up dust. We only saw 3 little tan, brown and spotted wild piglets which were cute at first glance but we had to remind ourselves that these things destroy the land, digging up the soil, devouring endangered plants and decimating crops.
Shortly after the pig incident we came across a wild citrus grove where random oranges and lemon trees just happened to be growing next to the trail. Maybe it used to be farmland or maybe an animal like one of the pigs had eaten an orange and pooped out the seeds. Who knows but it was so awesome and random to look to the side of the trail and see gorgeous, glorious juicy oranges growing.
We spent a lot of time trying to find the perfect orange and to our surprise the oranges were still pretty tart, tasting more like a cross between a lemon and a lime and were not very sweet. I found a lemon tree with some nice enormous yellow fruit and these were still pretty sour but strangely not as sour as the oranges. I chowed down on a lemon until the sourness puckered my lips too much and I had to stop. The rest of the afternoon we followed the fence line of a massive cattle ranch, the cows lowing and running whenever they saw us. We caught a glimpse of a few turkeys which was cool but we really had to stay focused since the trail wound in and out of oak hammocks and tall grass like a maze.
It was funny today because the terrain was definitely some of the first hiking it felt like on the whole trail. We’ve been walking on so many flat canals and paved bike paths and roads that our feet kind of forgot what it was like to hike on uneven terrain. At one point it was like my feet forgot what they were doing and I almost fell when the grassy trail had a few lumps in it.
The dug up ground from the herds of wild pigs made the afternoon hike difficult as there were huge pig wallows dug out of the earth, the ground turned up more often than not and you had to really watch your footing or you would roll your ankle in the uneven sand. The pigs will root up everything looking for grubs and roots and it was no different today. Besides wild pigs, we heard someone in the neighboring pasture “whippin’ shitties” as they call it in the country. They were burning up rubber and doing donuts somewhere in their fields and it was fun to hear them have so much joy tearing it up.
We had planned on stopping to grab water at the only creek that didn’t have runoff from the cattle ranches. I started to get nervous because we were slated to get there around sunset which you really need to avoid being around any body of water at sunset because of the alligators. Between dusk and dawn you’re not supposed to collect water because the alligators might mistake you for a deer and drag you in and drown and eat you. Fun times.
Luckily we turned it up into high gear and made it to the creek as it was just starting to get dark in the thick forest. The water was thankfully very shallow and clear so we could see that there were no gators in the immediate vicinity. The big gators really need deeper water but this was thankfully shallow enough where we felt comfortable scooping water, treating it and then heading another 2 miles to our campsite.
You can get a free permit from the Florida water management association or something like that to camp out here and they’ve set up picnic tables and fire rings to make the campsites nice. Tonight we found ourselves in a massive oak hammock with really nice flat ground. It was nice and thankfully we were the only ones here as other hikers had commented that they’ve been woken up by hunters in the past or had their tents peed on by coon dogs who came through howling with their GPS trackers on and marking everything with pee.
When we got it in we did a quick check for animals and heard something in the bushes running around. Usually pigs or raccoons will hear you and scurry away. Armadillos on the other hand don’t see or hear too well and they don’t really always know you’re there until you’re right up on them. In the past we’ve been scared very badly by the harmless armadillos and those things can jump like 2 feet in the air when they’re surprised. Tonight we saw an armored little guy under one of the bridges that we crossed in the marsh land. Now at our campsite there was a good sized one digging for grubs and bugs in the grass near where we were camping. I think we scared him and once he realized that we were nearby, Mr. Dillo ran as fast as he could into his sizable den under the fallen branch of a live oak tree. All you could see was his banded tail sticking out and you had to admit was kind of cute.
Shannon and I ate a dinner of Cuban rice and beans with bananas and stayed current on our electrolyte balance with some Propel electrolyte drink mix. Then I took some night photos which was fun as I was trying to work on getting better at composition. The orange thumbnail of the moon came out under the wispy Spanish Moss dangling from the live oaks. It was really pretty and the frogs were croaking and you could hear herons squawking next to the river. Our tent was about a five minute walk away from the Kissimmee River where you could collect water but we weren’t even thinking of that because we’d heard that there’s some massive gators hanging out on the banks. Plus it was dark and I don’t want to get eaten by a big old gator – I like my life! Then it was bedtime and we tucked into our sleeping bags, listening to the sounds of our armadillo friend digging and rooting through the woods near his tunnel hideaway.
