Florida Trail End to Ender

This week of hiking was our last week on the Florida Trail. Actually we didn't really need to hike it anyway. The FL Trail has two official ends. The traditional end, which we hiked this week, is along the gulf coast to Ft Pickens. The alternate end, which we hiked last week, connects to the Alabama Trail and on to the Appalachian Trail. In both of the other places on the FL Trail were there are two official routes I had already hiked both options so I wanted to do both ends.

My good friend Brian is hiking the Eastern Continental Trail. He has been somewhere behind us for the past several months on the trail and finally almost caught up to us. He is completing the last few days of the Florida Trail on the alternate end, and will continue on through Alabama and then to the AT. For this week we have all been staying with another good friend, MaryBeth, at her appartment. Each day I have been dropping off Brian for his day's hiking, meeting back up with Ian for our hike, then picking up Brian again at the end of the day. I'm exhausted. You could have caught up to us a week earlier Brian! But it's been an awesome week: great camararderie and the completion of the Florida trail for the three of us.

Our beach walk was great. From Navarre Beach to Pensacola Beach the road was totally destroyed by Hurricane Ivan several years ago. The ruined road is closed for reconstruction, but still hikeable. It’s amazing to see the damage that water power can do to a road. In several places the entire road was washed out, but for the remainder, large sections of the top skin of blacktop had been lifted off by the water and carried about 50 feet north of the road. It was incredible to see the entire road surface laying either intact or jumbled up beside the original road. We alternated by walking the road and the surf. We got to watch a couple of dolphins playing in the surf, stopped just to sit on a dune and watch the sunset, and took our first night hike (completed walking down the middle of the road in the dark without headlights, and actually both with sunglasses on!) It was several days of very enjoyable hiking.

The last day was another short and beautiful sunny day. Walking the beach I couldn’t resist taking off my boots and socks and hiking in the surf. It felt great, and I wasn’t even worried about the natural exfoliation of all my hard won calluses with only a few more miles to hike. Eventually the trail turned back to the road the final mile or so of trail and I almost got my first snake bite of the trip when I almost stood on a Moccasin sunning itself right on the double yellow line in the middle of the road! Fortunately Ian was right next to me and saw the snake and warned me to back away when I was within a step or two of it.

At the Ft Pickens terminus it was a rather emotional touching the final blaze together. It’s hard to think we have walked this far. We spent a few minutes celebrating and trying to get a self timer photo of the two of us together. Fortunately a group of cyclists came along. They were happy to oblige by taking a couple of photos of us together after they learned where we’d walked from. From there we took a boat taxi to Pensacola. After hiking 1400 miles I really didn't want to walk the 7 miles back to the parking lot!

The end of a journey. On soon to the next adventures.

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