Florida Trail: Day 40
Feb 15, 2022
Mile: 344.9 to 363.8 (18.9 miles)
Start: Hampton Inn, Dade City, FL via CR471
Finish: South Campsite, Richloam Tract, FL
This morning I woke up at 5:30 and could not go back to sleep so I read some books and messed around on the internet for a little while until Shannon got up at 8:30. We were supposed to meet the trail angel Canadian Dad at 10am and so we grabbed breakfast where they had cheese omelettes, bananas, oranges, peanut butter and hashbrowns and my favorite: the breakfast hotdog. The little name tag says it’s a maple sausage but who the heck knows to us it’s the breakfast hotdog and I’m obsessed with them. The only people we saw were in the 55+ crowd downstairs murmuring about the bible and looking like they might want to save us. The last time that someone on the Florida Trail tried to “save” us it got pretty scary as they tried to separate Shannon and I and then blocked our exit with their car. We decided it would be safer to take our breakfast upstairs and ate while watching some more of the hilarious adventures of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. The CGI was so bad and the girls with their tiny outfits were so 90s and it was just hilarious. When Hercules was battling someone really bad the TV show would go to slow motion so you could see his well conditioned, slightly highlighted Fabio locks blow back and see everything in slow motion. So funny!
We packed up, quickly throwing stuff in a bag and I packed out the last of our leftover pickles because they were definitely a nice salty treat to eat on trail. Then Canadian dad and his wife Janet picked us up and drove us the 20 minutes back to the trailhead where we had left yesterday. They were super fun to talk to, telling us about how over 900 people a week moved to Florida which is why you see this construction all the time. And here I just thought it was Florida DOT was on their game. The DOT had just started construction on the road we had left yesterday and weren’t I guess supposed to start until March. There is some concern because with the pandemic prices have gone up on everything, especially building materials and with lumber being 40% more expensive it’s caused a lot of strain in the construction industry. For instance we found out that the new Tampa road widening project since Covid has caused some of the big contractors to declare bankruptcy and lately one shut down and walked off the middle of a massive road widening project. They said that one of the main roads in and out of a suburb of Tampa with only 2 lanes needed to be widened to 4 lanes. The contractor dug up all the cement and made the lanes go down from 4 to 1 and now they went out of business and the construction project isn’t finished with traffic worse than when it all started. That sounds like a real mess!
Anyways it was really great talking with Janet and Canadian Dad about being in the service and what it was like when he was deployed and how they were going to go hike the Appalachian Trail together hopefully next year or something. We said goodbye and gave them some donations for gas money and headed back out to the trail.
Today was cool because it’s our first day of gaining any sort of elevation that wasn’t a bridge or going over a culvert. Up until now the Florida Trail has been flat, flat, flat. And today we started going over what I think were big sand dunes created from one of the rivers cutting through the land. It was cool to be able to have elevation even if it was only 40 or 50 feet above the lakes and ponds to look down and see all the cool stuff below. Giant ponds were filled with lilies, egret, storks and we’re certain alligators but it’s kind of a cooler day so we didn’t see any. It doesn’t mean that the gators weren’t there though!
The morning was awesome going over the dunes and seeing actual little hills which was a nice change of pace. Even though it’s soft sand, it’s still easy to hike up and down. Looking on the map of the Florida Trail here it’s like they’re little ironic drama queens naming the dips and tiny hills “The Little Grand Canyon” and other funny names that only flatlanders could make up to have teeny bumps seem like massive mountains. We passed a trail to the Boy Scout Camp called Bigfoot Camp where you can tent near their cabins in the woods with names like Skunk Ape and Bigfoot and Sasquatch. It was cool.
Despite it being hunting season we didn’t hear any gunshots until later in the day but they were across the river from us so we hoped they would stay that way. We were wearing bright orange headbands from the sleeves of an extra large $2 cotton T-shirt from Hobby Lobby and superhero capes a.k.a. the middle part of the shirt cut out and strapped to our backpacks. It was fun on the trail and eventually stopped for lunch at a nice campsite where we filled up on electrolytes, ate our pickles and the oranges packed out from hotel breakfast. I cooked up some of Shannon’s favorite Right Rice risotto and we were both lulled to sleep under the dappled shade. It was difficult with full bellies and a soft breeze to feel motivated to go anywhere. It was all that we could do is keep our eyes open even though we had 7 or 8 miles left. All of a sudden we heard a faint crunching in the woods coming towards us and a very muscled deer strutted out towards our little clearing. He looked at us, flexed (at least it looked like it) and continued towards the water to get something to drink. Now we knew why there were random workout weights next to the campsite – they were for the deer to get swole.
I knew it was time to get going since it was getting close to 3 o’clock and we still had quite a few miles to go until our targeted campsite. Starting now it was now going to be a little bit of a challenge finding water so we made sure that we tanked up at this campground. We’ll tank up again in about 6 miles and do another heavy water carry 3 miles to the campsite. In spite of full bellies and sleepy bodies lulled to full on relaxation station in the heat of the afternoon, we trekked down a forest road where the trail crisscrossed into the woods at least 8 or 9 times. There were a few times we missed the orange blazes and then caught up with them again on the road.
We scared up some wild turkeys who are not only wily but very attuned to their environment so they heard us a long ways off, quickly running and flying away. Yesterday in the backwoods we had seen a guy on his tricycle pedaling as fast as he could through the WMA trails with his Doberman Pinscher along for the ride, running next to him on his leash. The Doberman seemed to be having the best time ever and it was definitely one of the weirder things we’ve seen in the middle of the woods.
The trail started to follow the Withlacoochee River which I believe in the Muskogean dialect means “crooked river.” You have to be careful out here because if there’s high water it’s too dangerous to cross one of the creek crossings known as Devil’s Creek because the unassuming river is too strong and will literally sweep you away. Luckily the water levels are very low especially compared to other hikers who had done this section of trail even in December and January and we are glad we had let the water levels die down. The hurricane season is something like June to November and then after that it starts to dry up again so we’re heading towards the peak of the dry season I guess. We lucked out because other hikers before us had said the ticks and mosquitoes were really bad. By the time we were walking through the cypress swamps our path was dry and there were zero mosquitoes or ticks to be found. Plus we have sprayed our bags with permethrin and apply bug spray every day so hopefully that helps our case.
We definitely don’t want to get Lyme disease as a bunch of our friends on the Appalachian Trail did and it really messes you up, especially if you don’t take the antibiotics soon enough. One guy Shannon met on the AT had refused to admit that he had Lyme disease despite showing flu like symptoms and the big red bull’s-eye around a tick bite. Instead of getting treatment, he kept on hiking and had to be evacuated off the trail by a couple of hikers as they found him passed out on the ground babbling incoherently and unable to move when they found him. When Shannon ran into him towards the end of the trail, half the guy’s face was paralyzed and he’s lucky to not be more damaged. Plus we’d known other people who didn’t know they had Lyme disease until it was too late and it messes you up for the rest of your life. Avoid ticks at all cost was our mantra.
This afternoon the trail skirted the river and some of the most massive cypress trees which were some of the biggest I’ve ever seen. Most of the pristine cypress that had survived millennia in Florida had been cut down by loggers and real estate developers. I don’t know if many pristine cypress strands still exist. The Senator, the oldest and largest cypress tree in the world, was 3,500 years old and had a trunk diameter of 17.5 feet before it was burned down in true Florida fashion by a Florida Woman smoking meth in 2012. We’d seen some petrified cypress trees out in Utah that were millions of years old and those things were absolutely enormous, more than 6 feet across and just made me wonder what untouched cypress would look like if they were allowed to grow. I guess that’s why we have nature preserves like the one we’re walking through.
You have to be pretty careful going through the cypress strands or even next to them because cypress roots are pretty funny – they stick out of the ground just waiting to trip you up and are called knees. The knees can be anywhere from barely surfacing out of ground to 4 feet tall or higher. They’re all different sizes and they’ll really trip you up, especially if the ground is uneven or covered with grass and you don’t see the knees. There were quite a few times this afternoon where we tripped on some of the cypress knees and almost fell but it’s still pretty and it’s a unique way for when the water rises for the tree roots to obtain oxygen.
We passed by several oxbows in the river and the dark black water even cascaded over some rocks in a mini waterfall which was our first real view of a river with more than ripples. The trail must be gaining elevation since the entire time we haven’t seen any cascades or anything in the rivers more than the tiny ripples that churn out slowly from alligators as they submerge. Now I’m sure the Withlacoochee River in front of us is filled with alligators but several intrepid souls had come through here and tied rope swings on either side of the river.
With it being on the cooler side and not really wanting to get wet or find out how many alligators were currently hanging out in the river, we left the rope swings to others braver than us just managing to scoop the black water for filtering and get out. The technique to collecting drinking water in what you assume is an alligator-filled body of water is to scoop it without causing a lot of splashing, back up your body away from the edge and if you need to scoop some more, go back in quickly and then back the heck up. Shannon volunteered to scoop the water this time and we each filtered an extra liter for camp tonight. Then I looked around to see if there’s any flat spots near the river in case we wanted to camp there but it seemed to be an unused road or fire break that was pretty lumpy so it didn’t look like ATVs or trucks came back. We heard gunshots nearby from hunters so we weren’t too sure if this would be the best place to be camping after dark. We adjusted our cool bright orange headbands and orange backpack covers handmade from Hobby Lobby for $2 and made sure the bright orange was visible as the sun started to go down.
As we approached the Devil’s Creek crossing, we found ourselves in a muddy cypress forest where the high water marks on the tree trunks were well above our heads. The Florida Trail people weren’t kidding that if the water was high that you shouldn’t hike here. Then it was time to cross Devils Creek where a hiker 2 weeks before us said she’d been able to keep her feet dry by crossing on a log. Well the log must’ve been washed away so Shannon jumped it, landed in the water and slipped in the mud. I shimmied over some makeshift wooden beams someone had placed across the creek which had me in water up to my knees. I didn’t dally around because I didn’t know if there were gators in this creek or not as the water was a thick deep coffee brown. I ran across the slippery submerged balance beam in a fashion that Simone Biles would be proud of and took off through the woods and into a burn zone.
The charred trail wound through a controlled burn which had happened a couple weeks ago to get rid of invasive grasses and plants. Nothing was smoldering but earlier in the day we had seen big clouds of smoke billowing in the air from yet another controlled burn. Geez! The air quality has been smoky most of the afternoon, smelling of roasting hickory and pine but not to the point where we needed to put our neck gaiters over our noses. As we neared closer to the burn, we both started sneezing from all the burnt leaves we were kicking up. It was not the greatest situation and we hoped that we would be able to breathe okay sleeping on the burnt ground tonight.
Like much of the Florida Trail, a lot of the ground was dug up by wild hogs and we hoped that they would leave us alone tonight with fewer things to eat in the area since everything was burned. We arrived at our campsite and surprise surprise no one was there. Camp chores ensued and we unpacked, set up tent, made some dinner which we shared and then went right into bed.
For some reason Shannon was kind of fighting me on hanging our food and refused to let me hang the food until he gave in and hung it. I think towards the end of the day sometimes we get grumpy, especially if there’s stressors like not getting hit by cars while road walking, not getting shot by hunters hiking, not getting eaten by alligators while grabbing water. I was hoping to hang our camping food because every single night we’ve been camping out in the woods here, we have heard all sorts of critters come by our tent during the night from raccoons to wild hogs to deer to armadillos. There was even one night that something quietly padded around our camp, circling our tent for a long while sizing us up, which might have been a panther. Anyways, we were in rural Florida which is absolutely filled with animals. To me it was kind of silly to not hang our food especially since we were carrying some smelly stuff like tuna, beef sticks, sardines and scented soap. Finally Shannon relented and hung the food from the branch away from our tent which was very nice. I don’t think he’s ever experienced the terror of having black bears circle your tent, ripping into your food or prying open bear proof food storage boxes and being so close to your face that you could feel them breathing on you like I have while camping.
It was so delightful to curl up into our sleeping bags as the night was pretty chilly for Florida. Both of us ended up having to pull on our mummy hoods on our down sleeping bags to stay warm. It was to the point where I was snuggled deep inside my 20°F bag with only a tiny breathing hole cinched around my nose and mouth and same with Shannon. We fell asleep thinking about our new frog friend who was protecting us, hopping on the outside of our tent. As I had been putting my stuff into the tent from my backpack, I felt something leap from my pack and brush the back of my hand. I looked down and there was nothing there but on the tent walls next to me was a small green tree frog who was very charismatic. He was a photogenic little guy and for some reason loved our tent probably because it wasn’t burnt like everything else in the area. He hopped from one side of the tent to the other, climbing on all the poles and I think he was having a good time eating bugs from his tent peak vantage point. Even as we went to sleep he would leap from my side of the tent over to Shannon’s and then my back to mine and we were wondering if he would hop away eventually or stay on top of our tent all night.
The moon was extremely bright and full and it was hard to sleep at some points as the spotlight blasted us from the burnt branches. We forgot that we were in the middle of the woods and not in a room where we could turn the lights off. During the night we heard something walk through our campsite kind of close so we turned on our flashlight and scared it away. It was probably a wild hog as Shannon said had heard it rip bark off a tree and grunt a couple of times. Maybe the wild pig was looking for that soft inner bark for food since everything else had burnt up. Who knows – I was just glad we’d hung our food so the pig didn’t have a reason to come break into our tent!