I wish I had the luxury of taking two months off to go on a big thru-hiking adventure like the Florida Trail. For now, I can instead live vicariously through others, like my friend Greg Plugg.
If that name sounds familiar, it’s because he and I kayaked the entire St. Johns River together a few years ago. After running Adventures, a kayak supply store in Florida for more than 30 years, Greg sold the company to new owners and moved to Virginia, then back to Florida and spent nearly two months hiking the entire Florida Trail as a long farewell to the Sunshine State.
Every year, just over 100 thru-hikers attempt a 1,100-mile hike from the Big Cypress Preserve in the Everglades to Fort Pickens near Pensacola Beach, just where Florida and Alabama meet. While pure hikers would have to endure about 300 miles of road walking, Greg chose to chart his own course.
While most people start in South Florida and head north, Greg started walking south and east through Florida. He stopped walking on the road, jumped on his bike, and rode a roughly 30-mile section of the Cross Seminole Trail in central Florida.
One day in early January, he finished his bike ride at Townhouse Restaurant in Oviedo. There I met him for lunch and heard about his adventures.
Since I last saw Greg, he had lost 20 pounds, even though he was consuming an estimated 6,000 to 7,000 calories a day and frequently waking up in the middle of the night to eat his second or third dinner. If you walk for more than eight hours a day, it becomes difficult to replace the calories you burn.
He made it clear from the beginning that he had no intention of breaking any records or counting it as a technical thru-hike. Greg was just out to enjoy it.
The previous day, he had a serendipitous encounter on a trail near Seminole State Forest when he came across a scared young bear climbing a tree. Greg said he talked to the bear for about five minutes, but luckily Mama Bear was nowhere to be seen.
There’s a popular saying in the trail community about “doing your own hike,” which basically means letting other thru-hikers make their own decisions even if you don’t agree with them, but I found myself lamenting how other thru-hikers were walking with earphones in or watching Netflix in their tents at night. If your goal is to immerse yourself in the outdoors with all your senses, it may seem like a questionable choice.
After lunch, we both enjoyed a beautiful January afternoon as Greg and I walked the 13 miles of scenic trails through Little Big Econ State Forest. This is where Greg often hiked when he lived in Geneva.
“I have spent thousands of days hiking in the Econ Forest, breathing in fresh oxygen from all the palms and plants and breathing out carbon dioxide to nourish the plants,” he wrote on Facebook. “For me and many others, this is a sacred place. This is a sacred place. And the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that I wasn’t actually born, but was hatched in the Florida swamps that I call home.”
Two days later, I picked Greg up on the side of the road just outside the Tosohatchee Wildlife Management Area near Route 528 and had him skip the 30-mile road-walking section of Nova Road. We found ourselves in the heart of the Deseret Ranch, 300,000 acres of land owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
We were sad that one day all that land would be developed and another piece of Florida would be taken away.
Twelve days later, Greg texted me that he had finished the trail. It’s natural to feel a sense of accomplishment, but what Greg felt after completing the hike was more complex.
“It made me want to spend more time in the Florida wilderness,” he said. “There was a lot of sadness before it ended because it felt like either Florida was past the point where it could be repaired or the natural habitat was destroyed and surrounded by roads.”
Perhaps if more people spent time in nature and loved the great outdoors of Florida, we would all be more motivated to preserve it.
For more information on how to hike the Florida Trail on your own, visit floridatrail.org or floridahikes.com.
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