Florida by the Foot
In 2022 and 2023, Maria Llorens hiked the entire 1100-mile long Florida Trail. She packed an eyelash curler and hairspray. "We tend to pack our fears and weaknesses," she writes.
IN NOVEMBER OF 2022, I SAID GOODBYE to my friends and family in Miami and took a hot pink Silver Airways plane emblazoned with “Conch Republic” to Pensacola. I had decided to take on a ridiculous quest: hike the entire Florida Trail — beginning at its northern terminus on Pensacola Beach. I would hike for 1,100 miles, carrying only a backpack with my necessities. I would pitch my tent night after night. A warm bed and a hot shower in a motel, church, or friendly stranger’s home would be my weekly treat. Barring injury or emergency, I wouldn’t return home until I touched the southern terminus in the Everglades.
The Florida Trail is one of only 11 hiking trails designated by Congress as a National Scenic Trail, meaning it has “significant scenic, historic, natural, or cultural qualities.” It was founded by Jim Kern in the 1960s, and federally designated in 1983. Kern caught the hiking bug while visiting the Appalachian Trail on vacation and hoped to continue hiking when he returned home to Miami. He realized there weren’t any long distance trails in Florida — so he asked his wife to drop him off around the 40-Mile Bend of the Tamiami Trail on a chilly March day and he started walking north.1
I decided to go south. I hoped to camp through the Panhandle’s milder fall temperatures, get to the trail’s halfway point near Gainesville before it got too cold, and continue south through the height of the winter dry season. Timing didn’t go as planned, so I got everything Florida has to offer: freezing, wet, hot, dry, and buggy. Everything but a hurricane and a hailstorm.
Turns out I’m a slow walker. Doubly so when lugging around 40-plus pounds of gear, food, and water on my back. I had read all the suggestions advising to cut down my pack weight as much as possible. Less weight, less pain, more speed.
But being ascetic proved tougher than I imagined. I packed the tiniest of first aid kits, but I refused to leave my eyelash curler and hairspray behind. We tend to pack our fears and weaknesses. Apparently, I’m not afraid of bleeding out in the forest as long as I don’t have a hair out of place.
Both at home and on the trail, I was often asked what the hell I was doing. Hiking is not something people associate with Florida, even though nearly a third of its land is designated for conservation purposes.2 Natives and snowbirds alike have rarely heard of the Florida Trail. To most Americans, the iconography of the outdoors brings to mind mountains, campfires and s’mores, wolves and bears, chilly temperatures and flannel. At most big-box stores in Florida, you’re more likely to find a t-shirt of Zion or Yellowstone than any of the three national parks we have in the state – Everglades, Biscayne, and Dry Tortugas.
In our politically and socially polarized present, the wild and the people who dare to explore it still unequivocally capture the public imagination. I found being “outdoorsy” has a moral dimension. On a trail, even a city slicker from an exotic party town like Miami can garner exclamations of “Wow, I admire you! I could never do that,” and “You’re a gutsy girl!” Now and then, someone would offer me a beer or quietly pay for my lunch. I was surprised by the kind gestures, but they always seemed more grateful to me for having told them about the trail.
The Florida Trail weaves in and out of the wilderness – a complaint by some who prefer the desolate escape that more remote trails provide. As I became addicted to the noisy silence and rhythms of nature, there were times I had to agree. I woke up with the sun and cacophonous mobs of birds, fell asleep under glittering black skies as coyotes howled. Despite my best efforts to rush and make big miles, the wild often stopped me dead in my tracks. I stumbled upon a massive bald cypress swamp and felt awash in something holy surrounded by life that was hundreds of years old, life that had known and felt more than I ever would.
But over time, I grew to like that the trail would wind its way back toward people. I walked through nearly half of Florida’s 67 counties and one of the Seminole Tribe’s six reservations. People shared snippets about their lives (sometimes a little too much) and told me about the local spots that made their towns special. Trail angels – Florida Trail enthusiasts who assist hikers – drove me into town so I could shower and stock up on food. I ate kettle corn at the Yesterdays Festival celebrating pioneer history in Keystone Heights and watched alligator wrestling at the Seminole Tribe’s Chalo Nitka Festival in Moore Haven. I read almost every historic marker I saw to try to capture how each place and its people fit into the patchwork of the state. Having forced myself into almost constant solitude, encountering other people started to feel like a gift.
But I was constantly reminded of the careless destruction that follows “civilization.” Land being shorn of all its plants and wildlife to make room for cookie-cutter houses, beer bottles and granola bar wrappers strewn along the trail, and water so completely polluted by agricultural runoff that it can’t even be filtered. And people, too, are among the casualties if they find themselves opposed to the powers that demand order, growth, and profit.
In the Suwannee River section, the trail takes you across an unmarked old bridge near the town of Live Oak. The old U.S. 129 bridge is decorated with a flurry of candy-colored graffiti, the work of locals and festival-goers visiting the nearby Sound of the Suwannee Music Park. On January 2, 1944, 15-year-old Willie James Howard was lynched right by the bridge for sending a Christmas card to a white girl he liked from work. There is no sign or marker to remind anyone of the killing. I learned this from a navigation app that hikers use. The pinpoint for the bridge offered a one-sentence description and a link to a PBS documentary.
The documentary is about local civil rights activist Harry T. Moore, a name I’d never heard. After the lynching, he wrote to Thurgood Marshall, then the NAACP’s chief legal counsel, to request help with pursuing a federal investigation. The Howard case proved too difficult to pursue. Moore grew up in Live Oak, but spent formative years in Jacksonville, which was then considered a “Harlem of the South.” His lifelong efforts to investigate lynchings and his leadership in Florida’s NAACP resulted in the bombing of his home while he and his wife slept on Christmas Day in 1951. Their deaths became national news. Klan involvement was all but certain.
Hiking the Florida Trail made it clear how much I still have to learn about my home state. Pick any part of the trail and you’ll find an entire world unto itself. In that same Suwannee section, saw palmettos and longleaf slash pines give way to mossy live oak branches arched over blackwater rivers. If you’re lucky, you’ll find armadillos, alligators, black bears, white-tailed deer, rattlesnakes, gopher tortoises, and barred owls. If you dig into its history and culture, you’ll uncover countless stories from the area’s earliest inhabitants dating back to 800 B.C., the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, small towns, ghost towns, and true crime — they are just pieces of the trail.
Shortly after returning home, I attended a prayer walk led by Betty Osceola of the Miccosukee Tribe of Florida. The purpose was to oppose the potential removal of artifacts recently found at a development site for luxury condos on the other side of Brickell Avenue, across from the Miami Circle, a 2,000-year-old archaeological site. The “Circle” was discovered in 1998 and is now in the National Register of Historic Places.
Betty explained to that crowd that if we don’t protect our history, we won’t protect anything else. We won’t protect people or the environment. When we remove our history, we become placeless and without community or identity. We are choosing death, I will staunchly defend Florida as a place worth keeping alive. Don’t believe the naysayers. Its land, its people, and its history are all worth discovering.
Maria Llorens is the Policy and Research Director at Miami Workers Center. Born and raised in Miami, she is passionate about working to build power for Miami’s working-class tenants and low-wage workers to ensure a better future for all. She spends most of her spare time in the Everglades, listening to records, and sharing her film photography. She founded the Miami Hiking Club, which hosts regular urban and wilderness hikes to help Miamians connect with nature.
A version of this story originally appeared in print in Issue 8 of Islandia Journal.
https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/essays/jim-kern-started-the-florida-trail-four-decades-ago-hes-still-waiting-for/2326548/
http://edr.state.fl.us/Content/natural-resources/2023_AnnualAssessmentConservationLands_Chapter1.pdf