These are Just Some of My Favorite Springs

I've been visiting the clearwater springs in Florida since I was about twenty years old. I never get tired of them. Because there are so many springs there, Carole and I are far from visiting them all. In fact, we haven't even visited all of the 33 first-magnitude springs there. I think we're only halfway down that particular list. Then there are the many second and third-magnitude springs, many of which are spectacular and worth seeing. We've been to a number of those, also.

We're gearing up for our first big vacation of the year. This one, like many of our other trips, will feature visits to big springs. We'll be seeing two we've spent time at before: Ichetucknee Springs and Salt Springs. Those are two of our favorites and well worth the time we'll spend on them.

Ponce De Leon Springs. This one used to be a county park, but is now a State Park. Not the biggest spring, but we had a great time swimming there.

Rainbow Springs. This one is pretty darned big. I took this composite shot from a high bluff above the head spring. It was once a private amusement park but when Disney World killed off the clientele for many of the mom 'n' pop amusement parks in Florida, the state was able to step in and buy up most of the ones that had scenic, historical, and environmental value. Thus it was with Rainbow Springs.

Manatee Springs, another absolutely striking first-magnitude spring. And, yes, it is frequented by manatees.


This is Blue Springs. Another of my favorites. It's a big hangout for manatees seeking warmer waters when the St. John River gets too cold for them. This is where I was when two manatees swam up to me a few years ago.

Rock Springs Run. This one was also once a private property that ended up in the hands of the State of Florida.

Carole took this shot of me at De Leon Springs. Not to be confused with the much smaller Ponce de Leon Springs. This is another really big spring that was a private amusement park in its day and which the state was able to purchase and convert to a state park.

Manatee Springs, Day One

Just a few photos from the first day of our Spring vacation.

Normally, we wait unitl later in April or early May before we take our first long vacation of the year. But for various scheduling reasons, we settled on earlier for 2009. As soon as I'd gotten off work, we loaded the truck, attached the trailer, and headed south to get an early start. I finally ran out of steam around Hilton Head and we pulled into a SC rest area and parked the rig to spend a few hours sleeping. We got up about daybreak and continued our trip to Manatee Springs, arriving there at around noon.

Carole and I get the trailer set up and the campsite ready.

We headed down to the spring to take a look. The weather was really much cooler than we'd anticipated, but the water there is a constant 72 degrees so we decided to jump in and have a swim.

Carole took this one of my standing at the edge of the limestone shelf above the spring vent. It was pretty deep there. Not sure how deep, though.

The raccoon who was checking out our campsite for a possible raid. Fortunately, the raccoons at Manatee Springs are not as bold as the ones we've encountered in other parks.

Florida Trees

Trees: Their House, Your House.

The southern cedar, representative tree of the barrier islands along the Gulf. We saw a lot of these trees. Initially, this was the reason these islands were settled--the virgin cedar forests were cut and the ecosystem gutted, along with employment. When the timber companies finished removing the cedar forests, they abandoned the people they'd previously employed.

On my trips, even though my knowledge of trees is highly limited, I'm always on the lookout for very large or unusual trees and plants. I found a few such flora on this latest trip. I did manage to locate a couple of pretty big darned cypress trees. One of them was between the headsprings at Manatee Springs and the inlet of the run along the Suwaneee River. This was the first day we arrived at the park before the flood waters reached the area and river current became too fierce and too filled with flood debris to make canoeing a safe bet.

A nice bald cypress along the Manatee Springs Run.

I talked Carole into letting me beach the canoe in the swamp so that I could pick my way to the base of the big cypress where she was able to take my photo. I'm not sure, but I suspect this particular cypress was hollow, since all of the other cypress trees in the area were nondescript and the only reason this one wouldn't have been felled would be that it was hollow and the timber company allowed it to stand.

Not sure what this is. But it makes for a colorful photograph.

A couple of days later I found another large cypress inside the Fannings Spring State Park. It had been surrounded by water from the rising river, so I wasn't able to walk right down to it as I could have if I'd found it earlier. However, I climbed over the boardwalk trail (much to Carole's dismay) and she was able to take a good shot of me before the big cypress.

Wish I'd found this one a couple of days earlier before the flood waters started rolling in.

On another day we took a hike through the San Felasco Hammock State Park and that was a rewarding trip. But just in the fact that we were able to take a 2.5 mile hike through a mature hardwood forest. The park claims to have some champion caliber trees, but I didn't see anything that looked like more than your average second growth hardwood groves. Still, it was a good day to be out and about with cool temperatures and a nice breeze. The bugs were kept to a minimum. Later we visited Cedar Key State Park and I saw a Sand pine, a species I'd never encountered.
A Sand pine. These live only in limited areas along the Gulf coast of Florida and a tiny bit of coastal Alabama. They require sandy, well-drained soils. They're a very rare tree.

The Powerful Flood

Mother Nature almost succeeded in sinking this vacation for us. First, there were torrential rains just before we left that fell over southern Georgia and northern Florida. This water ended up inundating the various river systems, slowly working its way downstream and flooding the lowlands. Fortunately for us, it took a few days to reach the campground we were using at Manatee Springs State Park. In addition to the rain, it got unbelievably cold for this part of Florida at this time of the year. One night the temperature reached freezing! No swimming for us that day!

One of the more unfortunate results of the flooding was that all of the first magnitude springs along the Suwanee River ended up "going dark". That is the river level rose above that of the head springs so that all of the beautiful, fresh, clear waters were overtaken and blotted out by the tannin-rich waters of the Suwanee. Alas!

But we enjoyed the springs while we could. Manatee was still high enough above the level of the Suwanee so that it remained clear the whole of our time there. However, after we left, the river did overtop the spring and the park was closed until the flooding ends. As I write this, the park will be closed for at least a few more weeks.

Fanning Springs the day we arrived in the vicinity. Clear and beautiful.

A few days later, the Suwanee River inundated it and turned it dark.