We’re filling in the road walk between Bull Creek WMA and Tosahatchee Reserve. It’s about 30 miles total so we decided to go easy on ourselves and out feet and split it into 3 short days. We started out with a couple of miles through Bull Creek, unfortunately we couldn't get the car in as far as I would have liked tostart the hike. I was hoping to get in to the point where the trail crosses into Bull Creek from Forever. When I hiked up to here a few weeks ago with Grant we took the white blazed connector back to the car, so now I have a tiny 2 ½ miles "hikelet" of Bull creek still to hike!
The trail itself was a little rough through the palmetto, long grass and cypress swamps, but nice to have a whole day off the roads again. We saw several hunters, and some very close shots, but no wildlife to speak of, just a couple of tiny frogs, several clumps of pitcher plants and some of the joys of winter hiking in Florida, wildflowers. In the last 3 miles at the northern end of Bull Creek the grass was high and the mosquitoes very large and voracious.
Exiting the woods on Thanksgiving morning, we were now in for the long road walk. We took our Thanksgiving lunchbreak on the level grassy bank by the road. While eating lunch I noticed a large black spider investigating my boots. It looked like a miniature version of a fake plastic spider with bright green fangs. Only it was real! It was quite placid while I shoed it around trying to get a photo, however when it spotted Ian’s lunch mat it took off in that direction, and as it reached it it turned into attack mode.
I haven’t seen Ian move that fast in a while, but I didn’t have to wait long for a repeat. Immediately after setting out for the afternoon, Ian suddenly stopped moving forward and backed up very rapidly. I thought it was probably another spider until I heard a rattle. Coiled right in front of him was a large rattle snake, as thick around as my forearm. He was quite defensive, hissing and pulling himself up, so we never saw him stretched out, but I would guess he was about 4 feet long. That sure made us look where we were putting our feet for the remainder of the afternoon. A little further down the road we saw our 4th hawk of the day. It was quite an exciting nature walk for being beside a road. We finally made it back to the car, and drove to Moss Park for the annual Florida Trail Thanksgiving campout dinner. We were very late after all the delays of the day, but thankfully they had saved us food. And it was good.
The remainder of the hike was all roads. Not very pretty, but a pleasant enough walk considering it was alongside a couple of quite busy highways. Fortunately the grass sides were wide, and mainly fairly level. We did have a little “Ianism moment” when almost to the end of the road walk, he, for some strange reason decided he hadn’t hiked enough miles down SR520. We were taking a break at the junction of 520 and Yates where the trail changed direction. The blazes were not entirely clear where to cross the road and change direction, but the map for some reason shows a walk down one road and a complete U turn back again down the other. Guess who had to walk it all the way down to the next junction just in case there was a blaze down there? As I continued northbound and turned to watch him “making miles” I saw a SOBO blaze indicating that the trail turned directly onto 520 there, but he apparently had already made up his mind to walk down 520 and back up Yates. Gotta love him!
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