Florida Caverns State Park

10-3-21: Back on the road again I did a quick rainy overnight stay in southern South Carolina and the next morning I way up early and started the 6 hour drive to my next stop at the Florida Caverns State Park.

Due to the length of the drive I decided to just grind it out on the Interstate rather than continue my usual rural routing. The section thru Georgia confirmed my memories from my time there in the late 80’s as the state having the rudest/worst drivers ever. Gritting my teeth the miles slowly clicked down and then…

The Interstate did its job and after a long day I arrived at the park. In October of 2018 Hurricane Michael had hit the Florida Panhandle as a Category 5 storm and you can see the impact in the forest here. In the old growth trees if they survived the storm the lost their limbs and the undergrowth and smaller trees are coming back. The Ranger told me that 90% of the 1300 acres in the park were affected by the storm. The campground had just reopened on October 1st and the site I had included full hook ups was very nice and the bathhouse was also one of the nicer ones I’ve seen on my trip so far.

After setting up camp I rode the bike down to check out the Blue Hole swimming area, spring fed and a shimmering blue at times, it currently wasn’t very blue probably from all the recent rains. I did see an interesting piece of buggy nature while visiting, not sure exactly what this is; a clump of bugs/larvea/baby bugs? on the surface of the water. I have never seen anything like this before and so I ran back to the RV and grabbed my camera to capture it.

I also took a video which shows the activity a bit better.

I asked several park Rangers and no one was sure beyond maybe something to do with “water bugs”. As you can imagine google searches for clumps of bugs and related terms turns up all kinds of things but nothing for certain. If you know please comment and let me know!

It had been drizzling off and on throughout the day and in the mid 80’s for the past few days and the water was pleasantly cool in contrast. This sign posted at the Blue Hole really made me feel like I’d found the real Florida!

The next morning I visited the park store and signed up for a cave tour later that day. The caves have a long and interesting history geologically and after the park was established in 1935 they had help from the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Project Administration of the 1930’s. More history here.

The guided tour is about an hour long and filled with details on the history and geology that formed the caves. My tour group guide was “Honey Bee” and she was pretty hilarious in addition. I’ve never really explored caves before and found the whole experience very interesting. I took a ton of photos and the album is linked below.

Cave Tour photos

The weather continued to be rainy with thunderstorms off and on during my stay here and I wasn’t able to paddle the Chipola river as I had hoped, Baltzell spring joins the river about a 30 minute paddle upriver from the boat launch and I really wanted to see it. A reason to return in the future!