We visited the Carl Duval Moore State Forest last week on a Thursday for our "Adventure Friday" outing and walked both of the trails. This smallest of all Florida State Forest provided us with a few unique finds.
Our first stop was the North Tract, to walk the trail that skirted a pond. It was an interactive trail, meaning that it had several signs marking various types of trees. We really like interactive trails, because the kids tend to learn and remember trees better this way than by looking at pictures in a book. Several trees and plants we have seen often enough know that the kids can pick them out without needing a sign to double check their guesses. The North Tract is listed as a 1.5 mile loop trail, but it only measured 1.25 miles. At the beginning of the trail, the area burned sometime in the last 3 to 5 years, judging from what we've learned about how a forest returns after burning. The girls flaked some charcoaled bark off a few trees and brought it home for sketching. The North Tract was an easy hike, except for a patch which had really thick sandspurs and caused the kids a great deal of angst. Kate however, snapped a gorgeous picture of the pond just before we reached the sandspurs.
Since the North Tract was such a short hike, we then went over to the other half of the state forest and hiked the South Tract with is listed as a .75 mile hike to Hardesty Lake and then a .75 mile hike back. All Trails though, said we actually was a 2.1 mile round trip. So for those keeping up we hiked 3.3 miles for the day. The South Tract had a kumquat tree (we believe) growing practically right at the beginning of the trail. (We brought a piece or two of the fruit home to verify with our resident agronomist.) That was a fun suprise. Most of this trail was a straight forest road, though we did get to cross Alligator Creek which Kate particularly liked. On our hike we saw a ridiculous number of deer tracks everywhere. Unfortunately the ending was a bit disappointing, as we had heard you could see the lake, however, everything was grown up so high between the end of the trail and the lake that even standing on the picnic table I couldn't really see anything. However, we sat on what appeared to be a newly made picnic table, in a freshly bushhogged circle and had a snack of Cheetos and Capri Suns, before turning around and making the trip back to the car. We didn't get any pictures on that section of our hike, as Britt was on his regular Thursday phone call with his cousin from Virginia the entire second hike. However, Ruth worked at getting several micro shots of flowers and bees on the first hike of the day. All of the kids are entering pictures into the State Forest's photo contest.
If you'd like to make a trip the address to the North Tract is 400 West Street, Interlachen, FL and the address to the South Tract is 135 Clouds Ave, Interlachen, FL. The park is open sunrise to sunset. Entrance to the Park is free at both locations.
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