Florida Trail: South Florida Hiking Guide

Official companion app to "The Florida Trail Guide" guidebook by Florida Hikes! At the southern terminus of the Florida Trail, experience America's answer to the Amazon as you slosh through the middle of the sawgrass savannas and cypress strands of Big Cypress National Preserve. This wild, wet wilderness cradles pockets of rainforest-like beauty amid open prairies and haunting wizened cypress. As the most remote and difficult portion of the Florida Trail, this seasonal section takes some swamp walking savvy. Once on dry land, your feet will take a pounding. More than any other part of Florida, South Florida has been radically reshaped by human activity, the ditching and draining of the Everglades more than a century ago for agriculture. Passing through the sovereign nation of the Big Cypress Seminole Reservation alongside its roads, the trail continues up a series of levees feeding agricultural interests all the way to Lake Okeechobee. As the second largest lake entirely inside the United States, it provides a sense of perspective to your hike, no matter whether you choose to hike east or west around it. The Florida Trail circles it atop a 35-foot-tall dike built before our lifetimes to protect the lake communities from its angry spillover during hurricanes. Overlooking the cradle of sugar cane farming and ranching in South Florida, its views are worth savoring in all directions.