So far in my training for our June Cotswold Way walk in England I’ve been doing solo hikes on some of GNV’s best trails: in Barr and San Felasco hammocks, Paynes Prairie, Sweetwater Preserve, Loblolly and the like.
But Hutch has been following my On The Way To Cotswold Way blogs and he invited me to accompany him on a veritable maze of looping trails that he and his Flamingo Hammock neighbors have laid down, expanded and maintained over the years….decades really.
And one does not turn down Hutch. It would be like telling Grizzly Adams ‘thanks, but I’ll be fine in bear country all by my lonesome.’
Anyway, Hutch is a walking textbook on the flora and fauna of southeast Alachua County. And on our walk today he told me – and showed me – that examples of virtually every natural landscape in the county can be found in the acres of woods and wetlands sandwiched between SE 27th Street on the east, SE 41st Ave on the south, SE 15th on the west and stretching almost to Hawthorne Road on the north.
We’re talking longleaf pine forests, shady oak-laden hammocks, winding streams that disappear into the aquifer, sand hills, palmetto scrublands, draining swamps, saturated prairies.
There are ancient turpentine trees that still bear signs of being tapped back in an earlier century.
After a while I felt a bit like I was wandering through Endor. Although to be fair, Hutch is a bit tall and shaggy (though certainly old enough) to play Obi Wan Kenobi to my heroic Luke Skywalker.
Fun fact. At one point we were struggling up a steep hill that is the beginning of the Cody Scarp. This ancient geological formation runs all the way to Tallahassee, terminating on the hill where we perched Florida’s phallic capital building.
Another fun fact, every stream and river that crosses the Cody Scarp disappears underground at some point – The Santa Fe River for instance – with the sole exception of the Suwannee.
Which is why the twisting creek we were following abruptly vanished into a sinkhole. The fish who end up there have no where else to go and are, um, ripe for the hooking.
Water is a defining feature in this mini-wilderness. Because southeast Alachua County is basically a sponge. But unlike most of the previous hikes I’ve done, the well engineered and well tended trails we followed all remain high and dry.
This is a purple flower. Hutch told me its name, but I forgot.
On the right, Hutch is standing next to Flam Ham’s water gauge tree. There are colored ribbons 10 or 12 feet above ground level to denote the high water mark when Hurricane Irma visited in 2017.
This is Ron Cunningham. Still on my way to Cotswold Way by way of Flamingo Hammock…and Endor.
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