Restoring Crooked Creek | Coast to Canopy

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I limbo under a fallen tree and slide down the ravine. Well, I slide for a few feet and resume walking down until I hear the rush of water. I cross a bridge of two two-by-fours to photograph a small waterfall from above. I then climb down to the ravine bottom. The water falls into a round pool, rushes over a few rocks, and continues as a sandy-bottomed stream, curving out of site.

This is the headwaters of Crooked Creek, a steephead ravine that starts on Annie Schmidt’s property.

A favorite part of this job is that I get to explore our area, and find hidden spots like Annie’s waterfall. I do most of this exploring on public land. Here, though, is a singular opportunity. We’re going to explore rare habitats and restoration areas not open to the public.

In 2008, Helen Roth purchased a parcel of land in western Gadsden County. This is the Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines region, the epicenter of rare and endemic plants in our area. This region also has the highest diversity of tree species in North America. Not that Helen knew this at the time. But, as she learned about the plants on her property, she was inspired to join the Magnolia Chapter of the Florida Native Plant Society. This is where her life took a turn, and she was soon convincing others to buy adjacent properties, and learning how to set the land on fire.

The Crooked Creek Conservation Coalition

Every once in a while over the last few years, someone would tell me that I should do a story on Helen Roth. Now and then, one of my conservation-minded friends would post a call for volunteers on social media, to help plant wiregrass or longleaf pine on her restoration property. I finally met her a couple of years ago at Tall Timbers, where she was helping on a prescribed burn.

I had assumed that she was like a lot of the people I interview, a career biologist or land manager. It turns out that she came to this life by chance. Once set on her path, she found experienced people to help her learn, and who would join with her to create the Crooked Creek Conservation Coalition.

We have a lot to cover in this illustrated and annotated blog post for this Coast to Canopy podcast episode. To help you navigate it, I added a clickable table of contents just below.

Meet Our Guests

Helen Roth is the founder of the Crooked Creek Conservation Coalition, and a Certified Prescribed Burn Manager.

Annie Schmidt is a conservation biologist and a Certified Prescribed Burn Manager. Annie used to live on The Nature Conservancy’s Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines Preserve (ABRP) when her husband Jack worked there. On the WFSU Ecology Blog, we first met Annie on RiverTrek 2012 when we scaled Alum Bluff, and she gave us a tour of the ABRP sandhill. We met her again on that property as we looked for indigo snakes.

Dr. Jean Huffman is a Dendrochronologist at Tall Timbers Research Station. Jean was on Coast to Canopy in 2025 to talk about her tree-ring fire study. As we’ll soon see, Jean has used this expertise on Helen’s property.

Dr. Susan Carr is the Senior Conservation Project Manager with the Putnam Land Conservancy, president of the Paynes Prairie Chapter of the Florida Native Plant Society, and Board Director of 1000 Friends of Florida.

Coast to Canopy blog posts are curated transcripts. My notes appear in italics.

1. The Story of the Crooked Creek Conservation Coalition

Helen Roth: I was lucky. I had the great fortune of being able to purchase this hundred-acre tract of land from my father, who received it from my brother’s estate. And that was back in 2008 when I purchased it. And I really knew nothing about how to manage it. I just knew it had really pretty flowers. Did not know the name of them, did not know what I needed to do.

So I started reading books and taking classes, and one of the classes I took through Master Naturalist program was on the steephead ravines out on The Nature Conservancy property (the Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines Preserve). And the field trip leader was Billy Boothe. It turned out he had property downstream from my property. And he told me, you need to go join the Florida Native Plant Society, Magnolia Chapter.

The meeting was the next night. So I went, and that just changed my world. I met so many people who were so generous with their time and knowledge to help me learn what I needed to know. It is through that organization that I met Annie, and I met Jean, and I met Scott Copeland and Susan Carr, who are all part of this coalition.

With a Little Help From Her Friends

Helen Roth: Doctor Loran Anderson, who has passed now, but he was professor emeritus (at Florida State University), was so generous with his time and coming out and helping me develop my plant list. And when anybody would identify a tree or whatever, I put a little aluminum tag on it so I can refer back to it later in a different season to see, how does that compared to this other plant that I found?

There are so many other people who just have been wonderful helping me find the historical maps of the property so I could start to learn the history of it. And then, Jean did a great slice of a tree stump that she was able to age, to slice, and polish up, and she could see all these fire rings on it. And it’s 300 years old. We’re still working to identify exactly what year it died, to be able to date those rings, but it’s just cool to have this huge slice.

And then another friend, Nicole Zampieri, came out, and she did cores in the living trees, of all the longleaf pines that looked old, had flat tops. Of the ten trees that she did, I have two trees that are side by side. One is the oldest and the other one’s the youngest, but they don’t match up in size. The oldest is the smallest and the smallest is the oldest. And it’s 200 years old. So it’s just cool to know.

2. The sandhill: a fire-dependent longleaf/ wiregrass ecosystem

Helen Roth: I didn’t even realize – I knew that it had longleaf pine, but it was very difficult to see most of it because it had gone through a long period of fire exclusion, and the laurel oaks had moved in and just blocked view of the canopy. I could see the bark, I could see from the edge some of the canopy.

But there was only one place, and I call it my reference area, which was clear and had been frequently burned by my brother as a hunting plot. It had healthy wiregrass and I could see the full height of the longleaf pine. It was only about an acre, maybe two acres large. And I just looked at that and said, “I want more.”

Susan Carr: We’ve got every type of starting condition. We call Helen’s our desired future condition. That’s some kind of jargon… Her place was never cut over or soil disturbed. It wasn’t chopped or bedded or disced or anything like that.

And then we have every thing beyond that.

On my property, yes, I have stuff that was in Sand Pine Plantation, then cut over. I have areas that were buried. So, soil disturbance. And I have places that were just fire-suppressed, but were not soil disturbed. And I keep buying more land. So now I bought this other 80 acres that actually has really nice second growth longleaf pine on it, but just really fire suppressed.

Annie’s property- restoring The Nature Conservancy way

Helen’s property had longleaf and wiregrass, but without fire, oaks and other hardwood tree species encroached on it. Annie’s sandhill habitat had been clear cut and replanted with sand pine by the Saint Joe Land Company. I ask her what sand pine was harvested for.

Annie Schmidt: Pulp, paper, chips for fuel.

We do have native sand pine in the scrubs, but this is a different species. Not quite the native one. And, all through Saint Joe Paper Company land, they planted sand pine throughout. It turns out that they had cleared the first initial area abutting Helen’s property, and it was Helen and her husband that said, “oh, you guys ought to buy this!”

We bought about 154 acres, and I think we bought it after it was cleared. So, it was absolutely nothing…

We bought it in 2016 in October and, after they had cut it, once the ground cover got light, all the species that belong in sandhill habitat type were coming up. It was incredible. That fall we planted the Wiregrass seed mix, and the pine trees. And burning. We were off to the races, but we started from nothing.

We looked at Helen’s property and said, someday, it will be like that. That’s the cool story about all of our properties. We started at different stages of the restoration.

Moonscaping

Annie’s husband, Jack, worked at The Nature Conservancy’s Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines Preserve (ABRP). Annie was involved in several projects at ABRP as well. In 2019, I produced a story on The Nature Conservancy’s restoration work at Torreya State Park. The restoration expands the sandhill habitat at ABRP, and the potential range of eastern indigo snakes released on the preserve.

Similar to Annie’s property, the Sweetwater Tract of Torreya State Park is sandhill habitat around a steephead ravine, that was converted to sand pine plantation. Annie and her husband restored their property using methods learned at The Nature Conservancy.

Above, you can see two stages of the Torreya restoration. Below is a side-by-side comparison of Annie’s land with one of the Torreya plots.

Both of those photos were taken in the winter. At this distance, you can more easily see the plant diversity during the fall wildflower season. The best way to see it is to walk among the grasses and look down.

Cat-faced trees

Helen Roth: I knew I had a lot of cat face trees that were still alive.

Rob Diaz de Villegas: That’s a very common thing throughout our area, a big part of the history of this area. So, what’s a cat face tree?

Helen Roth: It’s from the turpentine industry. And that’s where they did the cuts to gather the rosin, and it would drain. And then after they quit doing that, the tree would heal over. So it doesn’t look as much like a cat face anymore. But there are scars. It is a vulnerability for the tree. It affects when and how I burn, and what I do afterwards, because a lot of them, with combination of the fire exclusion, have a lot of duff around the base of the trees.

I have to time my burning right after heavy rain. And then after the burn, I go around, look for smoldering because I don’t want the tree to die because of smoldering duff.

So, they’re special. They’re not going to last forever. They’re gradually dying, and they remain as snags. And I appreciate them.

3. Steephead ravines: a geologically unique haven for rare and endemic plants

Helen Roth: Our water comes from Annie, through mine, through Susan’s, Billy’s. It’s this Crooked Creek, and it’s flowing west and north, which is interesting that it flows north.

It hits Flat Creek right before Flat Creek goes into the Apalachicola River. And it’s going by the Aspalaga Unit of Torreya State Park. Our vision is to get the full corridor of Crooked Creek under conservation easement. And there are other interested people along that corridor. It may be doable, but that is our goal.

An aerial view of steephead ravines in sandhill habitat. This area is underlain with an impermeable rock or clay layer. When rain falls on the sandhill, water collects on this layer, and will sometimes seep out into the Apalachicola River. The seep starts washing away sand from the sandhill, and will, over geologic time, move inland. The areas of the Crooked Creek steephead we explored were between 6-7 miles from the river.

Unlike other ravines in our area, steepheads erode from the bottom. This creates deep, narrow pockets in the sandhill. Steephead streams are groundwater, 68 degrees Fahrenheit, flowing rapidly over a sandy bottom. These conditions create a haven for plants and animals not suited to most north Florida landscapes.

Steepheads and fire

Fire kills back hardwood trees, keeping a sandhill open and grassy. Where the land slopes down to water, fire reaches less frequently, and hardwood trees grow into a more densely packed forest. But fire still reaches into a ravine every now and then.

Helen Roth: As far as ravines go, initially I thought I needed to have a fire lane to separate the uplands from the ravine. But I’ve gotten more comfortable with the idea of just letting the fire creep down into the ravine. If there’s fuel to burn, it’ll creep down further. If there isn’t any fuel built up again, it won’t creep as far.

It just will go as far as it needs to go, but it’s still within the outside border of the property and just need to make sure it doesn’t climb back out.

I have a great picture that Jean took of the fire going down into the ravine, and it sort of outlined the seepage stream down at the bottom before actually hitting it and going out. It’s a fascinating process. And then the recovery. I mean, it recovers fine. Even the mountain laurel, it’ll grow back again.

Annie’s Property: the headwaters, and a waterfall

I’ve explored steepheads closer to the Apalachicola River, at Torreya or ABRP. They originate by the river, and their headwaters migrate inland over time, branches forming off of the main channel. Looking at the Google map, I see that Crooked Creek has grown further from the river than the ravines I’ve previously visited. Here’s an opportunity to see how steepheads carve into different landscapes.

Annie’s property contains the Crooked Creek headwaters. Here, a stream seeps from higher up, and tumbles into the ravine stream in a waterfall.

The headwaters are fed from multiple small branches, streams coming together to flow north into Helen’s property.

Helen’s Property: restoring the stream of a one-sided ravine

On Helen’s property, the ravine slope flattens on one side, opening up the stream valley. This makes for nice drone shots, such as those shared by Neil Jones.

When Helen bought the property, the stream was dammed, impeding its proper flow.

Helen Roth: Hurricane Sally damaged the dam, the backside of it. So U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service stepped in and agreed to remove it and did a beautiful job, and that was an offer I couldn’t pass up. In addition to restoring my uplands, now I’m restoring the stream bed so salamanders and little darter fish can go from the creek unblocked by the dam all the way up to Annie’s Channel.

And then the stream itself, they just let it create its own channels naturally, except for where the dam was. They cut a curvy channel in there, and they… saved some of the vegetation from the dam to plant that edge. And they came back and planted some water loving plants on that short stretch: river oak, and cypress trees, and sycamore trees.

Then they gave me a lot of longleaf pines that I could plant on the drier slopes leading down to the creek. So I did that. And so they’re beginning to get a pretty good height.

It’s sort of exciting watching the comeback of the plants. Juncus ( a genus of rushes) sort of took over all of it. And now it’s dying back again where you have a clear discrimination of the upland ridges with grasses and then the wetland bogs.

Some seepage bogs along one of the edges that’s just all wet, all the time. Lots of yellow-eyed grass and sphagnum moss and club moss showing up. So those are good wetland indicators that it’s a constant wet area slope.

Spring Canyon

As the stream flows northward, it again enters a deep ravine. I first learned about the geology of steephead ravines from Dr. Bruce Means. As a steephead erodes a sandhill, the slopes reach an angle of 45 degrees, the angle of repose. Any steeper, and the sand would slide downhill.

Sandhills lie along an ancient coastline; they were likely barrier islands like St. George Island. On these properties, we’re further north than Torreya or ABRP. Here, the underlying geology seems to be different, and we see the steepheads form small canyons.

Below is Spring Canyon, on Helen’s property:

Helen pointed out longleaf pine growing in the canyon, close to the edge where the canopy is unobstructed by hardwood trees.

A cool canyon on Scott Copeland’s property

The day I visited Crooked Creek, Scott Copeland accompanied Helen and I. He didn’t want to come into the studio, but was definitely happy to spend a day showing off the land he helps steward. We previously met Scott last year at Gholson Nature Park.

We rode to where Scott’s land abuts Helen’s. His restoration area looks much like Annie’s, an expanse of grasses scattered with young pines. His land had been bedded, a planation practice where soil is mounded in long rows. This kind of ground pattern lets you know you’re on disturbed land.

We followed Scott to his canyon. Here, the ravine has expanded into soils containing red clay. Like at Spring Canyon, we see the land fall off in a way we don’t see in steephead ravines further south. You can see that he also has a few longleaf pine trees at the edge of his canyon.

The edge of a steephead on Susan’s land

I don’t have any photos inside of Susan’s section of Crooked Creek, at least not in this section of the blog post. When we visited her sandhill restoration, though, without trees to block our view, we could see how the land slopes down into a steephead.

We’ll see some of Susan’s steephead slopes in the next section.

4. Steephead Ravine Plants

Since we’re already in the Crooked Creek steephead, let’s take a look at its plants.

Helen Roth: All the pretty flowers I initially saw were down in the ravines, you know, the mountain laurel and the Florida anise, and the orange flame azalea and the pink ones also. And those were the flowers I held in my hand going, what are these? And I’ve later learned what they are and a lot of them are endangered.

The pyramid magnolia was one of the early trees I identified based on, you know, leaves I found on the ground. And when I read that it was endangered, the light bulb went off. If I have one endangered plant, I must have more. And I can’t protect them if I can’t identify them. So now I’ve got to go learn all the plants.

Trees and shrubs in and around steephead ravines/ slope forests

I’ve linked to this map before: an FIU professor mapped the diversity of tree species in the US. The Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines region, Liberty and Gadsden Counties, have to most tree species in North America, and the most endemic tree species. I also use that word a lot, endemic. An endemic organism is one that is found in a small region, and nowhere else. We’re about to met a couple of plants that are not found outside of this region. Others are endemic to sandhills, or sandhills in north Florida. This area is a botanist’s dream.

We’ll get to the endemics in a moment. First, let’s meet a few of the other trees we find here. Many of them are common further north, but not so much in Florida.

The Florida Torreya tree

Helen Roth: When we were exploring the new property that Susan has just 400 feet off my property, we found a nice size Torreya tree. I knew that they were at least two miles within our range, so that that was cool to find. I just have little seedlings I planted with seed that I got from the Atlanta Botanical Gardens.

Susan Carr: Torreya is Florida’s only federally endangered tree. And it is only right in this area. It’s a really weird thing… Kind of like the American chestnut story, it has a fungus that kills adult trees. So there are a number of seedlings and saplings still out there, but not a lot of large ones.

Apalachicola rosemary (Conradina glabra)

Helen Roth: I went traipsing throughout the Torreya state forest lands (in Liberty County), while it was still sand pine, with Annie looking for the Conradina glabra population so that we could further monitor them after it was cleared and restored. And they survived very well… they like that extra sunlight.

But just two years ago, I was on my property and I slammed on the brakes on my UTV as I was driving by it.

“Oh my God, this is Conradina glabra!” How did that get there? And it’s in part of my restoration work where I’ve opened up the canopy and I’ve cleared off vines. It got the habitat it needed, and it was a nice sized bush and flowering. I called Annie and she took care of vouchering it. So it is recorded

But it’s a very lone plant. It’s only two miles from the main population, but it is a different county.

Apalachicola Rosemary is a federally endangered plant, and had previously only been found in Liberty County. Helen’s lone plant extends the species’ small range slightly into Gadsden County.

5. Sandhill Plants

Susan Carr: The aspect of longleaf pine woodlands – they really are woodlands, it’s very open with a lot of grasses and shrubs and stuff like that on the ground. So if you think about it, in the canopy, you have one species: longleaf pine. In the mid story, there may be a few oaks or whatever, but on the ground cover there may be hundreds of species.

This is what I studied for my PhD. So, I could go on and on. Hundreds of grasses, sedge, forbs, asters, all kinds of stuff. So that’s where the plant diversity is. It’s also where the animal diversity is in terms of insects, things that live under the ground, like gopher tortoises, pocket gophers. So many snakes live in that.

The diversity is really in the ground cover. And the ground cover is maintained with these frequent, cool fires that deter these things growing up in their being forests. So, if you take fire out, they turn into a forest.

As Susan says, there may be hundreds of species on the sandy surface of this habitat. The following are a few plants of interest, or that we haven’t previously covered on the WFSU Ecology Blog.

Gholson’s blazing star (Liatris Gholsonii)

In the sandhill, much of the purple we see in the fall wildflower bloom comes from blazing stars, of which there are several species. Gholson’s blazing star (Liatris Gholsonii) is named for Angus Gholson. This species of blazing star is endemic to the Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines, and some surrounding areas. There is also a population just to the west, Washington County.

Gholson’s blazing star is listed as endangered in Florida. While blazing stars usually grow in the open understory of longleaf habitats, this species is at home where the sandhill transitions to a closed-canopy steephead ravine. Helen seems to have a robust population:

Milkweeds

Here are a few of the common milkweed species found in a Florida sandhill. They’re the three species I had always seen while walking in the Munson Sandhills, though last year, while searching for the rare prickly pear longhorn bee, I found clasping milkweed for the first time. You can walk the same sandhill for years, and it will still surprise you.

Gopher apple

This is a common, but important, ground cover plant in a sandhill. I’m including the photo because I’ve never seen the fruit, which is what gives the plant its name. Frequent fire makes for an open, grassy understory, which is what gopher tortoises need to make their burrows.

The open understory is also a landscape full of food, like the fruit of a gopher apple:

6. The animals of Crooked Creek

A diversity of plants, both in the ravine and in the sandhill, is a diversity of food sources for animals. Helen and her friends have photographed quite a few, and she also has a game cameras:

Butterflies of Crooked Creek

Helen Roth: Brown elfin, Spring Canyon is one of the best places to find that because I have so much mountain laurel and it uses that as a host plant. So they’re tied together.

And the king hairstreak that they’re monitoring likes the horse sugar. So I try to be sure I protect some of that.

Gopher tortoises

Jean Huffman: Of course, the gopher tortoise is an indicator of good ground cover. A lot of the effort that we do out there is to take this degraded habitat and get back the ground cover, which is where the diversity of plants are. An indicator of success is gopher tortoises.

Helen Roth: Biggest success is to get those baby gopher tortoises.

Jean Huffman: Helen has gopher tortoises that kind of made it through the fire exclusion and the hardwoods smothering out the ground cover. Now, she brings the ground cover back and the gopher tortoises are doing well. And it’s the same thing with Annie and Susan’s land where you actually do ground cover restoration.

And now the gopher tortoises are coming back and expanding.

Snakes of Crooked Creek

The combination of sandhill and ravines makes the Crooked Creek properties an ideal place to see diverse snake species. As we learned in our Snake of Florida episode of Coast to Canopy, many snakes in our area spend a much of their time underground in sandy soils. Others use gopher tortoise burrows for shelter. Many of the snakes will hunt in steephead ravines as well as the sandhill.

Pygmy rattlesnake (Sistrurus miliarius)

Helen shared two photos of pygmy rattlesnakes, and they illustrate how different their patterns can be.

Florida pine snake (Pituophis melanoleucus mugitus)

Kim Sash and Pierson Hill brought in a Florida pine snake for our snake episode, which let us get a look at a snake that few of us see in the wild.

Pine snakes are fossorial, and Kim and Pierson shared that they will spend 80-90 percent of their time below ground in rodent burrows. Pine snakes hunt pocket gophers, small rodents that, like gopher tortoises, burrow into sandy soils.

Eastern Coral Snake (Micrurus fulvius)

Another fossorial snake, venomous coral snakes inspired a rhyme to distinguish them from nonvenomous king snakes.

In the photo, red touches yellow, and while a bite from an eastern coral snake is a medical emergency, poisoncontrol.org only reports two fatalities in the last 100 years. So, not likely to kill a fellow.

Eastern Copperhead (Agkistrodon contortrix)

Most of Florida’s copperhead snakes are found along the Apalachicola River watershed, though iNaturalist shows several observations between the Escambia and Yellow Rivers in the western panhandle. This is a venomous snake, and easily identified.

Eastern diamondback rattlesnake (Crotalus adamanteus)

The most venomous snake in North America is always a sight that demands our attention.

Not only has Helen encountered adults such as the one above, but she has also witnessed their young at the mouth of a gopher tortoise burrow:

As stated earlier in the post, over 300 animal species make use of gopher tortoise burrows. Multiple species might share the space at the same time, though something tells me that’s not so much the case when a diamondback makes a nest in one.

Helen sent a video along with this photo, and in it, I could hear Annie asking her, “What did Bruce Means say?” If you have a question or interesting observation regarding eastern diamondback rattlesnakes, who better to present those to than someone who has spent over 50 years studying them?

Coachwhip (Masticophis flagellum)

This is a long, nonvenomous snake. The Florida Museum of Natural History has a handy guide to help distinguish it from other long, dark snakes in our area.

Not a snake, but looks like one: The eastern glass lizard (Ophisaurus ventralis)

This is a legless lizard, and another burrowing reptile.

In the ravine: crayfish and salamanders

From the many animals that burrow into sand to hide from heat, cold, and fire, we now head down to the cool steephead stream. This is a great place to find a variety of salamanders, such as the Apalachicola dusky salamander, which is endemic to the area.

Helen also captured this excellent photo of a crawfish. Is it eating another crawfish?

Helen and her friends live on, essentially, a 1,000 acre preserve. They have upland and ravine habitats, in the biologically diverse Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines region. Helen shared a sampling of photo highlights, and one gets the sense there is still much more to see. As their restored habitat matures, more plants and animals will move in, and they will doubtless uncover new surprises.

If I’m lucky, I’ll be back here to document this landscape as it evolves.