Photo: Brandon Moore (Raskuly) / CC BY 4.0 · source

🌲 Forests

Highlands Hammock State Park

Sebring, FL · Central Florida

About

Four miles west of Sebring sits one of Florida's first state parks, where a boardwalk threads a bald cypress swamp past trees that were already ancient when the Spanish arrived. Walk the catwalk over black water where alligators drift and barred owls call, then drive the three-mile loop past oaks so broad it takes a few people holding hands to ring one. The Civilian Conservation Corps crews who cut these trails in the 1930s left behind a museum and a hushed, cathedral feel that still holds.

Highlights

Boardwalk and historic catwalk through an old-growth bald cypress swampThree-mile loop drive linking nine short nature trailsThousand-year-old cypress and one of Florida's largest live oaksCivilian Conservation Corps Museum in a 1930s CCC-built structureAlligators, white-tailed deer, gopher tortoises, and wading birds

Getting there

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Florida State Parks

Florida's park service runs about 175 state parks, and these are the ones worth planning a trip around. Wild barrier islands and sugar-sand beaches, deep springs and dark caverns, 19th-century forts and prairies where bison still roam, from the Panhandle's emerald coast to the coral reefs of the Keys. The definitive short list, not the whole directory.