4/19/08 Hike

Since last fall Danny and I have been participating in a local program called “Trek Ten Trails“. It’s basically a community initiative to draw attention to some of the cool hiking/walking trails we have in Polk County, FL and to get people off the couch and outdoors. The organized “treks” occur monthly at designated times and locations, but participants are free to hike them on their own schedule. Danny and I made the first couple of group hikes, but have mostly been doing them as we have time – mostly due to our rigorous wedding planning schedule. That’s all behind us now and the newlyweds are free to hike almost any weekend we choose.

Last Saturday we decided to make up the Saddle Creek Nature Trail hike at Saddle Creek Park in Lakeland. It was only a couple of miles from our house and dogs were allowed so we could check this hike off our list, exercise the dogs AND still have plenty of day left to clean the house (woo hoo!)

We headed out the door at approximately 9am. We remembered to bring water, our Trek Ten Trails booklets, digital camera and backpack. Halfway there we remembered we didn’t have our compass, but decided against turning around. We arrived at Saddle Creek Park, found the trailhead easily, found a shady parking spot and hit the trail about 9:20am. At 9:22am we had walked about one minute down the trail, been completely swarmed with huge mosquitoes and walked one minute back to the trailhead. We drove home, got a bottle of bug spray, the compass, made a turkey sandwich and were back on the trail just before 10am.

The trail was actually pretty amazing and enjoyable with a heavy dose of bug spray. There were a lot of ups and downs which is unusual for Central Florida. This site is a former phosphate mine, so the ups and downs are probably man made.

We did get some great shots along the way. As you can see there is quite a variety of terrain ranging from a ridgelike area populated with millions and millions of ferns to more typical “Florida Scrub” areas surrounded by a sea of palmetto. We only saw one snake – we veered off the trail to walk down to the waters edge – I didn’t get a photo of it because I was too busy walking quickly back to the trail where I belonged. Did I mention I have a thing about snakes?

One of our main purposes in our Trek Ten Trails quest is to find all ten geocaches - there is one hidden along each trail. We don’t have a GPS yet, so we have to rely on the written directions. The geocache on this trail was on the east side of the big oak tree near the vehicle turnaround after you hike by three benches. Sounds easy enough – except we didn’t even see one bench on the whole hike. We finished our hike about one hour and three reapplications of bug spray later. We sat under the hatchback of my car, cooled off, watched the dogs lick the water bowl clean and recapped the hike. We were perplexed at not having found the geocache. As we sat there I looked at the trailhead sign which read “Teneroc Nature Trail”. My gaze then wandered to a sign that pointed away from us that also proclaimed “Nature Trail”. My gaze wandered about 100 feet further to a second trailhead sign that read “Saddle Creek Nature Trail”, which I suspect has three benches, a vehicle turnaround and a big oak tree on it…