Florida's last frontiers

By HERB HILLER

© St. Petersburg Times, published August 27, 2000

[Photos: Carlton Ward Jr.] Sun sets over the dunes and scrub at Topsail Hill, on the Gulf Coast in Florida’s Panhandle.

I was lost in a pigheaded urge to travel a road in western Glades County that my map showed did not exist. There was nothing to do but turn back.

Then I saw it: a deer, a big dog? Gray, brown, tawny? A cat. A big cat. I realized I had won the lotto!

I watched the panther as it eyed the car. In 30 seconds it turned its head, crossed the road and was away in the bush.

Wild Florida today lives at the edge: at the pushy edge of the suburbs, at the edge of what newcomers know about Florida -- and ever nearer the edge of extinction.

In the 60 years from 1936 to 1995, Florida's urban areas grew by more than 500 percent. More recently, on average, 180,000 acres of natural lands have been developed or turned into pine plantations each year.

In the wake of this onslaught, Floridians have chosen at least to slow wildlife's demise by their extraordinary political support for acquiring land to be preserved for public use.

Although land-buying programs began in 1963, the two big statewide programs began quite recently. Preservation 2000 and its successor, Florida Forever, pump about $300-million a year mainly into buying and managing "priority" lands that preserve natural Florida.

Imagine a beach with no people on it as far as you can see; it’s here, at the Panhandle’s Topsail Hill State Preserve.

These programs are unequaled in the United States. They not only protect wildlife but also help preserve Florida's water supply while affording exceptional outdoor recreation, much of it in wilderness.

It is the untamed aspect of these lands that speaks to us. Yet, remarkably few Floridians use these newest preserves. Immense Tosohatchee State Reserve borders the St. Johns River less than a tank of gas away from half the population of Florida. Still, fewer than 12,000 visitors a year come to Tosohatchee.

Fewer than 43,000 visit beautiful Topsail Hill State Preserve, a beach park in the Panhandle, 12 miles east of Destin and a half-hour from the big retirement community surrounding Eglin Air Force Base.

The lack of visitation is partly because many sites are recently acquired. Compared to established state parks, the new sites lack conveniences other than parking and portable toilets.

And even though Florida's water management districts publish free guides to most conservation lands, public recreation ranks low on agency agendas. Word hardly gets around.

Fewer than nine people a day meander along the paths of 46,000-acre Kissimmee Prairie.

To reach Kissimmee Prairie State Preserve takes 9 miles of driving along dusty pea rock road after the pavement ends 33 miles northwest of Okeechobee. Fewer than 3,000 visitors a year bother to make the drive.

Even these boonies were once slated for development. Peavine Trail was a railroad bed built to carry in settlers and supplies. A depot was built, but mainly the land stayed in ranching. During World War II, the preserve and surrounding areas were used by the Army Air Forces as a B-17 bomber training range. Unexploded ordnance still shows up beyond the dry tracks.

A caracara scans Kissimmee Prairie from its perch on an old fence post.

In midspring, ponds dry up and cattle on adjacent ranch lands shuffle off for midmorning shade. Windmills, their blades long gone, still tower above ancient cattle stockades. A great blue heron lazily lofts itself above spatterdock water lilies, arcs wide around and circles back into the wind before going off on its heading. Midsummer breezes dance across fields of marigolds.

The preserve's 46,600 acres encompass the largest dry prairie in the U.S.. But here, too, are wet prairie, hammocks, sloughs and scrub.

Wildlife viewing is exceptional. Driving along tracks through the preserve -- even without binoculars -- I sight crested caracara, deer, gopher tortoises, rabbits, ospreys, red-shouldered hawks and wading birds. At Seven-Mile Slough, I count 19 gators plus woodstorks, mud turtles and moor hens. The gators spook easily and cast off, submerging and resurfacing in palls of turbidity. When I startle deer, they prance into bush.

I aim my old Honda toward the distant edge of the Kissimmee River. The road varies from track to packed sand to grass, sections difficult with holes. Sometimes the path is cluttered with oak leaf detritus livened by starry white flowers with yellow eyes, atop short green stalks. In places what appear to be young pines rise from between the tracks and strum the undercarriage of the low Honda.

The sky burns down on the fire-scarred trunks of sabal palms. And then beyond even a trace of road, I reach the river. The Kissimmee runs through an Army Corps of Engineers ditch here, but within the decade it will regain its natural channel as part of the most ambitious river restoration ever attempted. It already seems to be succeeding near where I find myself.

A deer looks up from grazing in Kissimmee Prairie State Preserve.

Even here, as a canal, the river doesn't run straight. An island forms in the channel. I come about as close to the edge as I can, noticing pink snail eggs clinging to the ends of reeds. A turtle submerges, fish splash, a bullfrog goes off. A birder would have identified a dozen species by their sounds.

I take to the otherwise prevailing quiet with silence of my own. I find the husk of an armadillo and pick up some bony hinge of a cow I dust off and put in the car. A big snapping turtle surfaces by the roadside.

My eyes sweep to vast horizons uncluttered but by the tops of fanned cabbage palms, the blue sky beset by fleets of sailing white clouds. Small yellow flowers top the brush. A forked-tail bird with a white head flies by. Everywhere vultures hover above dry ponds.

Heading back along the pea rock road, I madly race a moment at 40 mph, kicking up the dust of ranchers not yet forgotten.

Tosohatchee State Reserve lies less than an hour east of Orlando and stretches along 19 miles of the St. Johns River. The river here is a lazy stream thick with water hyacinths and bordered by cabbage palms in the soughing breeze.

An eerie red glow gives away a gator’s nighttime position in Tosohatchee State Reserve.

A trail sets off south atop a dike beside the river. Thickets harbor clumps of bird of paradise; hibiscus clusters bushy pink along the bank.

Across a wide savannah, the river seems only puddles. Herons circle; ospreys nest atop trees snagged in the river.

The footpath nears a pond. I can see the path chopped by the hooves of horses and by fat-tired bikes, too. A shower of feathers blows across the path, their downy ends honey-colored.

Florida the way it used to be: Jim Creek Swamp, in Tosohatchee State Reserve.

Braids of the St. Johns flow to one side, sticks in the current sinking and surfacing. Cattle I come upon appear wild. The herd eyes a lone hiker warily, then spooks at a move that hardly seems sudden to me. The herd crashes about in a wild stampede, a streak of horns like kinetic directional signs topping the tall grass. In a flash I see why Florida's cowboys were called cow hunters: Their herds would have to be flushed from swamp and thicket, a realm where lassoes would snag on tree limbs, and cattle had to be cowed by the command of cracking whips.

For a moment mine was a Cracker world, and then, silent again, reminiscent of ancient Timucuans fishing the river. It was "a world in which nature and its forces were exalted," naturalist Bill Belleville writes in The St. Johns, A River of Lakes, "an ancient prelude to the transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau."

Just west of where shore road 30-A in Walton County merges with U.S. 98 is the entrance to Topsail Hill State Preserve. This 1,600-acre park was one of the most actively sought public acquisitions of the 1990s.

A bee drops down to sample the bloom of a water lily in Topsail Hill State Preserve.

The park preserves almost 4 miles of quartz-sand beach with dunes that rise 25 feet and protect freshwater coastal lakes. Scrub oaks and stunted pine greet visitors. A walkway wends between dunes to the beach.

In sections, the sand is hard-packed; elsewhere it's powdery, crunching underfoot. A glance shows why this beach was so important to protect: To the east and west, towers loom fierce upon the sky. Here, sandbars create lagoons, the shallow water imprinting sandy ridges. Elsewhere, inlets sculpt the sand, creating minibluffs a foot high.

Scrub growth surrounds ponds that form in the cleavage between dunes, edged by tall grass hissing in the breeze. The boardwalk gives way to the side of a sacrificial dune where climbing is allowed.

In a clearing between dunes, the big beach opens to the gulf. You glimpse what this entire coast was like before development. Buttes form, eroded by wind that shapes a surface of ripples.

I see no one. No one else enjoying what may be the most beautiful shore in Florida.

- Freelance writer Herb Hiller writes about Florida from his home in south Putnam County.

IF YOU GO

FOR INFORMATION on the lands described, contact Florida Park Service Marketing, 3900 Commonwealth Blvd., MS 536, Tallahassee, FL 32399-3000; call (850) 488-9872, fax (850) 922-4925; the Web site is http://www.dep.state.fl.us/parks.

For free guides to public lands published by Florida's water management districts, contact the following:

Southwest Florida Water Management District, 2379 Broad St., Brooksville, FL 34609-6899; call (352) 796-7211 or (800) 423-1476; the Web site is http://www.swfwmd.state.fl.us.

Suwannee River Water Management District, 9225 County Road 49, Live Oak, FL 32060; call (800) 226-1066 or (904) 362-1001; the Web site is http://www.srwmd.state.fl.us.

Northwest Florida Water Management District, 81 Water Management Drive, Havana, FL 32333; call (850) 539-5999, fax (850) 539-4380; the Web site is http://www.state.fl.us/nwfwmd.

St. Johns River Water Management District, P.O. Box 1429, Palatka, FL 32178-1429; call (800) 451-7106 or (904) 329-4500; the Web site is http://sjr.state.fl.us. South Florida Water Management District, P.O. Box 24680, West Palm Beach, FL 33416-4680; call (800) 432-2045 or (561) 686-8800; the Web site is http://www.sfwmd.gov.

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