My shoes are getting soggy because of a book. An out-of-print book written before I was born, that happened into my life a couple of years ago. The Watery Wilderness of Apalach, Florida was written in 1975 by retired FSU Professor Dr. Betty Watts. Dr. Watts defined Apalach as the area between the Suwannee and Apalachicola Rivers, and each chapter covers a different wetland or waterway as it was in the early 1970s. In one chapter, she embarks on a mission to find the source of the Aucilla River.
The chapter focuses on her attempts to find where the river emerges from a lake in north Jefferson County. But first, she tried to find its headwaters in Georgia. When she followed a map to its source, though, she only found a dry culvert. It’s a recurring theme to me, the inadequacy of maps to portray water bodies. Our lakes, rivers, and swamps have their high water and low water times. Some wetlands are, at times, little more than mucky places.
She was unable to find it that one time, but I knew a place she hadn’t tried. I had visited it several years ago: the Lost Creek Forest.
Lost Creek: a Mesic Hardwood Forest
I meet Beth Grant and her friend Jonae at the Cherokee Lake Pollinator Garden in Thomasville, Georgia. After retiring from a career as an educator and mental health counselor, Beth spearheaded efforts to create the pollinator garden and protect the Wolf Creek Trout Lily Preserve and the Lost Creek Forest.
The latter two are examples of mesic hardwood forest, an ecosystem found on slopes and river bluffs in the hilly parts of south Georgia and north Florida. Within a landscape of frequent fire, these are pockets where flames rarely reach. In the Tallahassee Hills, we find this habitat at Timberlane Ravine, AJ Henry Park, and Elinor Klapp-Phipps Park. Along the Apalachicola River, these forests are home to a higher diversity of tree species and rare plants. Places like Angus Gholson Nature Park and the Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines Preserve seem custom built for botanizing.
Two books I have, published in 1975 and 1985, say the Aucilla emerges south of Boston, Georgia. We now know that Aucilla Creek begins northeast of Thomasville. If you zoom in, can you find its origins?
Down a soggy hillside
A few years ago, I hiked this trail with Beth and a few community members. The trail brought us to a creek that Beth called Yamacraw, which I can’t find on any map. In fact, if you zoom into the area on Google Maps, you won’t see any creeks labeled, though you see hints of streams in satellite view. Tall Timbers Research Station has an interactive map which shows, just north of Thomasville, a few creeks joining with a channel labeled Aucilla River. Beth calls it Aucilla Creek, and it starts about a mile north of Lost Creek.
We’re not heading to the creek I saw that day in 2015, and we don’t stay on the trail for long. Both leads us downhill, climbing over logs and ducking under low branches. She stops now and then to show me beech leaves or a small hornbeam tree.
Soon, we find a small puddle, but it hasn’t rained recently. We then find another small pool in the divot created by the tipping of a tree, and small streams appearing from under piles of leaves.
I’m a little slow to put together that this is why Beth led me off-trail.
“In a lot of the forests down here, the big creeks come from seeps,” Beth says, “and ‘seeps’ means that the water table gets higher and higher and closer to the ground. And, the water just starts seeping out.”
What is a seep?
I’m no stranger to seeps, though I’ve never seen them in this exact setting. While the surface topography determines how we encounter seeps and the environments they create, they all start with the same underlying geology.
In most of Florida, when rain falls on soil, it percolates down into the Floridan aquifer. The aquifer is largely made of limestone, a porous rock that stores water. Over time, the limestone dissolves and voids form that can become large, underwater caves. This is our landscape of sinkholes, springs, and plentiful drinking water.
In some places, such as along the Apalachicola River, the rock layer beneath the soil is impermeable. Instead of water moving through soil and into rock, it pools up on top of the rock. This is groundwater, like that which flows from the aquifer into springs, and it is likewise a cool 68 degrees. But the water table is closer to the surface here, and where the land slopes, water seeps out.
In the deep sandhills by the Apalachicola and a few other north Florida rivers, seeps carry sand into the river channel and, over geologic time, this erosion forms a steephead ravine within the sandhill. If you follow a steephead stream from the river to its source, you find freshwater bubbling up from the soil. That water is always washing away soil, and slowly expanding the steephead further inland. We’ve spent some time learning about the plants and animals in these cool, shady places.
South of those sandhills of the Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines region, the land flattens. Here, subtle changes in elevation create gentle slopes. Seepage slopes in the Apalachicola Lowlands are also known as pitcher plant bogs, and are home to diverse carnivorous plants and orchids.
Seeps are an important driver of biodiversity in one of the most biodiverse regions in our country.
Watching the seeps come together
North of Thomasville, we’re in a hilly region, but not a sandhill alongside a river.
As we walk down the hill here at Lost Creek, we see more and more small streams of cool water. The ground becomes soggy, and we find crawfish chimneys like those in a cypress/ tupelo swamp.
Towards the bottom of the hill, we find patches of sphagnum moss.
When I first contacted Beth, I expected to be hiking on a trail to a spot overlooking a creek, and I didn’t expect to get my shoes wet. Now we’ve spent a fair amount of time bushwhacking downhill, and we have a choice to make.
The road is not far away, but to get there directly, we’d have to walk at the marshy edge of Lost Creek, navigating the woody vegetation growing here. And yet, we don’t feel like retracing our steps uphill. Here’s a chance to walk alongside a creek as it comes together.
Across the street, Lost Creek continues for another 1,000- 1,500 feet before joining with Aucilla Creek, about a mile from where that creek originates. Lost Creek is the first of many streams that add water to this channel.
“And so this one flows into the Aucilla,” Beth says, “and the other ones flow into the Aucilla, so it gets bigger and bigger and eventually it makes the wonderful thing that you have in Florida.”
The unconventional Aucilla River
That wonderful thing comes together in a messy way, and only manages to look and act like a typical river in a couple of stretches.
From the Watery Wilderness of Apalach, Florida, I learn that water from the Aucilla and other Georgia creeks makes its way into Sneads Smokehouse Lake, in north Jefferson County, Florida. From a kayak and canoe guidebook published in 1985 (both of these old books were gifted to me by the same friend when he left Florida), I read that the channel that emerges from the lake is small and full of obstructions until it reaches US 27 in Lamont. Here is where we started a canoe adventure back in 2015.
The Aucilla is a navigable river for about thirty miles, after which it sinks into the aquifer. You can continue to follow the river aboveground on the Aucilla Sinks section of the Florida National Scenic Trail, glimpsing its water where the limestone has caved in. The Aucilla emerges again for a few miles in the misleadingly-named Half Mile Rise section, where it joins with the main channel of the Wacissa River before plunging down once more.
The Aucilla rises and dips once or twice more before emerging from Nutall Rise and flowing for a few miles to the Gulf.
I’ve explored sections of this river over the years, and I know I’m not done. I’m interested in those marshy, messy, nearly impassible sections of the river north of US 27. Later this year, if we can get more rain into these places, I may try to wade or kayak in. It’s like walking down that soggy hillside by the Thomasville airport – It’s a chance to go where most people don’t go, and get behind the scenes of our remarkable waterways.
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