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Most of my long-distance hikes have ended as fall has begun to give way to winter, colored leaves just beginning to whirl to the ground. During the last few hundred miles, fellow hikers still enchanted with the experience and its concomitant freedom will inevitably ask the same question: “So, where do I go when I reach the end?” They’re always incredulous when I suggest Florida.

Early in 2022, still high from the beauty of completing the Pacific Crest Trail, my wife, Tina, and I flew to Orlando, where a friend scooped us and dropped us amid the snakes and gators of the Florida Trail. Tina was born in Florida, so by that point, I thought I knew the state fairly well, having visited more times than I cared to remember. I dreaded the trail, associating the state more with its combative politics and endless commercial zones than the beauty hidden within its boundaries. But we wanted to hike somewhere before the spring’s thaw arrived, and, by then, we had a vague ambition to hike all 11 National Scenic Trails, too.

It is now, however, my favorite long trail so far, offering a strange mix of majesty and menace (and mud, so much mud) that entertained us for almost all of the 1,500 miles. Hiking across Florida feels like navigating a Dalí-designed obstacle course, full of unknown hijinks and hiccups, as wild as it is wildly fun. If you’re looking to plan a good, warm walk for next winter or fall, say from late October until late March, when you don’t want to be high in the mountains and the Sunshine State is not yet a sauna, I cannot recommend the flatlands of Florida enough—no fooling. But there are some things I wish I knew before I started.

Just because it’s Florida doesn’t mean you won’t be cold. 

I make no claims to the aspirational mantle of ultralight. I am a happily middle-weight backpacker who always tries to mitigate the burden on my body while also packing enough comfort to satisfy my brain. Tina, though? She goes hard, swapping gear and stripping packaging to save grams in almost every instance. The Florida Trail taught her it was possible to go a bit too far. Assuming like most that every day in the Sunshine State would be hot and probably sunny, even in January, she forewent pockets on everything except a kangaroo pouch on a custom-made GooseFeat Gear down jacket. She saved slivers of weight rather than leaving some fabric with which she could warm her ungloved hands.

This, dear readers, was a mistake: We found ourselves in a historic Florida cold snap, so frigid that iguanas fell from trees and domestic pipes burst aplenty. At night in our tents, we were warm, but the days proved brutal to Tina, who would walk mile after mile on exposed levees and along canal paths, shoving her hands deep in her wind pants, with both a sun hoody and an Alpha 60 hoodie bound around her face until she seemed to disappear in layers of very thin fabric. Walking through swamps or mud puddles so massive they resembled little ponds didn’t help. The days would inevitably get warm by the afternoon, forcing us beneath umbrellas and shade trees and bandanas tucked beneath baseball caps. But in Florida, no matter where you are, there’s always water nearby; in the wintertime, that means you can get very damp and very cold, at least until the sun moderates it all.

If you’re good with gas station gastronomy, you don’t need that much food.

Few states blur the boundary between wilderness and civilization like Florida. It is more densely populated than every state except some upper East Coast places, and it’s directly in the middle when it comes to landmass. There’s a lot of people, and there’s a lot of room. I’m always struck by how quickly you can get from the most cosmopolitan elements of Miami to some of the country’s most desolate and dangerous places, like the Everglades or Big Cypress. This holds for much of the state, so that even when you feel forever mired by the mud of titi swamps or surrounded by infinite stands of cypress or oak, you’re probably not that far from one of the many highways that vein the state or some quaint little crossroads with a downtown diner and a roadside motel.

Which brings me to food: I should have packed less of it. If you don’t directly pass by a gas station or small-town grocery, you’re generally a not-too-distant hitch from one. I never ran low on my beloved Pop-Tarts, because there was always a convenience store nearby, and I learned to carry True Lemon packets on trail because I was able to swipe them from so many Floridian truck stops. We had access to energy drinks nearly every day (Bang was birthed in Florida, baby), and I’ve never hiked anywhere with more robust access to booze. There are incredible trailside Mexican restaurants, barbecue joints, and seafood dives, and we arguably indulged in too many. There’s even a famous vending machine in someone’s front yard, should hikers need to buy a soda on a hot day. Do it, and, in general, take less food than you think you need, because there is always some stop stuffed with cheap eats on flat Florida’s very broad horizon.

Sometimes it is best to keep your mouth shut, because Florida Man is real.

A proverb from my hotheaded Southern father: “Boy, one day your mouth is gonna write a check your ass can’t cash.” Nearly 40 years after he first told me that, Florida—and specifically, a fabled Florida Man—almost caught me with my overdraft fee. Some 250 miles of the Florida Trail involve walking on roads, a chance for you to focus, say, on meditation or simply not panicking as 18-wheelers roar within feet of your fleshy body. This will sometimes lead to mileage predicaments, where you need to hike well into the night to reach a campsite that’s not on private land or at least won’t get you shot.

Speaking of getting shot and walking on Florida roads at the opossum’s hour: One night, soon after we’d turned west into the panhandle, a canine menagerie broke free from its roadside fence and started giving chase. “What the fuck are you doing walking in the road in the dark?” a voice boomed from some unseen porch. Being the son of a Southern hothead, still working to keep his mouth shut after all these years, I replied in turn: “I don’t know, man, but why don’t you get your fucking dogs?” I shouldn’t have done that. The dude grabbed a flashlight and started jogging behind us, shouting some variation of what sounded like, “you’re going to die tonight, motherfuckers,” for 15 minutes.

We killed our headlamps and sprinted, our full packs bouncing up and down on our backs, until we ran into a state trooper taking his garbage to the road. He knew what hornet’s nest we had kicked and which chemicals were likely involved, and he volunteered to go settle things down. We raced to the only hostel on the entire Florida Trail, a shack beside a Baptist church dubbed “The Wilton Hilton.” Florida Man is real, but so is the less-ballyhooed Florida hospitality of folks like Wilton Quattlebaum and his congregation. They took care of us, and I learned—maybe?—to stop writing such large checks with my mouth. (Also, I recommend Claire Jarvis’ great zine, Slog, about a similar Florida Trail encounter.)

This is, quite possibly, the most fun you will ever have. 

I expected the Florida Trail to be both a sprint and a slog. I knew we’d move as quickly as possible over Florida’s flat central prairies and along its long stretches of road, but I thought that the trail would still feel endless, assuming a relative lack of diverse terrain (no mountains, no valleys) would make the whole thing monotonous.

But the Florida Trail not only deepened my appreciation for the state’s stunning beauty and subtlety, but also made me want to be there more. It was often miserable, with those cold mornings spent shivering and those afternoons spent wading through swamp water where unseen hazards lurked. It was often dangerous, from encounters with Florida Man and the rarer Florida panther, coral snake and the cottonmouth (also known as the water moccasin). And it was often monotonous, with those stretches of blacktop or wide-open prairie forcing us to get even better at entertaining ourselves.

Still, it was deliriously fun: Strangers handed us cans of cold domestics during late-night road walks, and I once got stuck in the mud after road-walking with a Four Loko. (I, uhh, quit drinking soon after this?) I learned to tell sticks from crocodiles at some distance. I learned to stomach water with all the transparency of a piece of wood. I walked into nice hotels caked in mud and smeared in ash from forest fires, laughing like a loon. The whole thing felt like some epic buddy comedy. I often think about hiking every trail I’ve ever done again, but I rarely ponder one as much as the Florida Trail—a 1,500-mile fever dream in the United States’ weirdest zone.