Geocaching on the Florida Hiking Trail
I went for a hike Sunday, March 2nd 2008, with two friends from work, Andrew and Jason. We went to a portion of the Florida Hiking Trail that’s north of highway 20 and between state road 77 and US231. We were on part of the Econfina Creek trail.
Andrew originally mapped out a hike that could be either 4 or 8 miles long depending upon whether we wanted to go further. We choose to do the 8 mile version, but do map inaccuracies (the trail dipped south for a while, then back north, adding a bit of distance) we ended up going 11 miles. I wouldn’t have believed we could do it if we hadn’t, but it was very fun and only mildly uncomfortable on the first part of the way back before I got my second wind.
We were also looking for geocaches along the way. We found five, of which I found two, which marks the first time I’ve ever been the person to find the cache itself. Andrew also created a brand new cache full of all sorts of goodies, including a travel bug.
We didn’t see too many people while we were out there; we met an old couple that lived in the area and got into a discussion about how many of the lakes and ponds in the area were all dried up now. There were many empty lake beds of sand. The old man attributed it to all the new construction in Panama City with too large wells draining the aquaduct. One of the lakes we were stopping to see, Rattlesnack Lake, was still there, but looked like it had lost quite a bit of water.
I have the rest of the photos I took in a hike photoset on Flickr.
