Day 37--Hiking in Big Thicket

We spent all day today exploring and hiking in The Big Thicket. We started the day with breakfast out at a small Waffle House in Lumberton. Then we began, as usual, with a stop at the Visitors’ Center, watching their video and looking at the displays. The Big Thicket is an amazingly diverse community of different ecozones, animals and plants. Organisms forced south by the glaciers adapted and stayed in this one area so that you have northern bluebirds living among roadrunners and bald Cyprus mixed in with northern holly and beech trees. It was so dense originally that no one settled there until the early 1800s, when southeast Native Americans were forced to relocate and so they found ways to adapt and thrive. The Ranger talked to us about the trails available and said that only one of them is open to bikes. That one has been closed for hunting season and she wasn’t sure about what kind of shape it would be in since it just opened yesterday. She also warned us that the trails were prone to flooding, just like at the State Park, where their trails are pretty much inaccessible because of the rain yesterday and last night. Nonetheless, we managed to hike to our hearts’ content. We went to Kirby Nature Trail, which has interpretive signs along much of it. We took the Cypress Loop, walked partway along the Turkey Creek trail and then took the Outer Loop for about a 3 mile hike altogether. It showed us parts of four of the ecozones in the preserve: forested slopes, acidic baygalls, flood plains and cypress sloughs. Then we took the half mile Pitcher Plant Trail, which leads through a mixed pine forest and across the corner of a wetland savannah, with four of the five kinds of carnivorous plants found in North America; it is missing only Venus Flytraps. Most prominent are the Pitcher Plants which are easy to spot, even though many were looking pretty sad from a recent frost. Finally, we took a 2-3 mile hike on Nature Conservancy Sandhill and Interpretive Trails. It took us across the sandy upland terraces of a longleaf pine sandhill community. Like the Big Thicket, the area is being restored and managed through a long-term program of prescribed burning and selective removal of introduced slash pine. Walking the trail, it was easy to imagine that we were walking in a sandy northern Michigan white pine area. However, the ground cover includes Louisiana Yucca and prickly pear. And the longleaf pine begins life as what appears to be a tall tuft of grass before it grows a deep taproot and then grows several feet taller each year. The needles (leaves) are up to a foot long and the cones are quite large too. It was interesting to see how it differs from pines with which we’re familiar. We also saw what appeared to be footprints in the sand of perhaps a mother black bear and a cub or two walking beside her. Tired from all that hiking we redeemed our Blizzard coupons, bought bread and milk, and returned to the campsite for a dinner of pork chops and sweet potatoes.