Florida Rivers That Don’t Behave Like Rivers

Florida has rivers that don’t always behave like rivers.

That probably shouldn’t be surprising.

This is a state built on limestone, riddled with springs, sinkholes and underground passages, surrounded by salt water and so flat in places that water seems to spend considerable time deciding which direction it wants to go.

Still, we tend to expect certain things from a river.

It should begin somewhere recognizable. It should flow downhill. It should remain above ground. It should generally contain the same water when it emerges from the other side of a bridge.

Florida occasionally ignores these conventions.

Here, rivers disappear into holes in the earth. They emerge miles later. One goes underground and comes back carrying considerably more water than it took with it. Another begins less like a river than a broad wet landscape. One of the state’s great rivers flows north while barely losing elevation. And somehow, in a state famous for being flat, another manages to produce actual rapids.

Once you understand why, you begin to understand something larger about Florida.

The interesting part of this state isn’t always what you can see.

Sometimes it’s what’s underneath it.

The St. Johns: A River in Almost No Hurry

Start with one of Florida’s biggest rivers.

The St. Johns River runs for roughly 300 miles through the peninsula before reaching the Atlantic at Jacksonville.

And it flows north.

That fact gets repeated so often that it can sound like the strange part.

It really isn’t. Rivers flow downhill, not according to compass directions.

The more interesting thing is just how little downhill the St. Johns has to work with.

Over its enormous journey, the river loses only about 26 feet of elevation.

Twenty-six feet.

There are houses in Florida taller than the total fall of one of its great rivers.

That helps explain the St. Johns’ character. This is not a mountain river charging through a valley. It moves slowly through lakes, marshes, wetlands and broad floodplains, sometimes looking less like a conventional river than an enormous watery system trying to find its way through an almost level state.

You can encounter very different versions of it around Blue Spring State Park and farther north around the river country of Palatka.

Florida’s flatness doesn’t prevent rivers.

It changes what a river can be.

The Hillsborough: Florida Somehow Has Rapids

Then there is the Hillsborough River.

If you know the river primarily from Tampa, where it moves through an increasingly urban landscape toward Hillsborough Bay, the surprise is upstream.

At Hillsborough River State Park, water moves across limestone outcrops and creates genuine rapids.

Not Colorado rapids.

Nobody is confusing this with the Arkansas River through the Rockies.

But they are real rapids—classified as Class II—and they are sufficiently unusual that Florida State Parks calls them a rarity in the state.

That makes sense.

Rapids require something Florida generally lacks: meaningful changes in elevation combined with exposed rock and moving water.

Yet there they are.

The Hillsborough River Paddling Trail provides another way into the river itself, moving through a landscape of hardwood hammock, cypress and limestone remarkably close to Tampa.

It’s a useful reminder that Florida’s reputation for absolute flatness is mostly accurate.

Mostly.

The Wacissa: A River That Arrives Almost Fully Formed

Most rivers begin modestly.

A trickle becomes a creek. Creeks combine. Tributaries join. Eventually there is enough water that somebody gives the thing a larger name.

The Wacissa takes a different approach.

South of Tallahassee, water emerges from a concentration of springs and very quickly becomes a substantial river.

There is something almost backwards about it.

Instead of watching a river slowly accumulate water across miles of landscape, you can encounter the Wacissa near its beginning already looking unmistakably like a river.

The Wacissa River is also one of the places where the new Big Bend destination layer becomes especially useful. You can move from the river itself into the springs, launches and wild landscape surrounding it rather than treating Wacissa as a name on a statewide map.

Then it gets stranger.

Downstream, the river breaks into braided channels through a wild landscape of wetlands and forest. Its water eventually becomes part of the larger Aucilla system—a system that has its own problems staying above ground.

The Wacissa is one of those places where Florida’s distinction between groundwater and surface water begins to feel artificial.

The river isn’t simply flowing across Florida.

Florida is flowing into the river.

The Loxahatchee: Where the Ocean Comes Up the River

The Loxahatchee begins in a Florida that feels remarkably removed from the South Florida surrounding it.

Cypress trees crowd the water. The river winds through protected landscapes. In portions of its upper reaches, you can still understand why the Loxahatchee became Florida’s first federally designated Wild and Scenic River.

One of the best places to enter that landscape is Jonathan Dickinson State Park, where the river passes through a remarkably wild piece of Southeast Florida.

The Loxahatchee River Paddling Trail takes you even closer to the cypress-lined upper river.

But follow the water downstream and its character changes.

The Atlantic begins asserting itself.

Fresh water encounters tidal influence. Salt water moves inland. The river becomes estuarine, and the boundary between river and ocean turns into a shifting zone rather than a line on a map.

This happens in coastal rivers all over the world, of course.

But in Florida, where elevation differences are small and the sea is never very far away, the relationship can become especially intimate.

The Loxahatchee starts by looking like an ancient freshwater Florida river.

Downstream, the ocean comes looking for it.

The Peace River: A River That Leaks

The Peace River carries another Florida trick.

Parts of it leak.

In the upper Peace, particularly through the karst country between Bartow and Fort Meade, water can leave the river through openings and fractures associated with the underlying limestone.

The river is interacting directly with the groundwater system beneath it.

That sounds strange only if you imagine a river as a self-contained channel carrying water across an impermeable landscape.

Florida doesn’t work that way.

Here, surface water and groundwater are constantly negotiating.

Rain disappears into the ground. Springs push groundwater back to the surface. Sinkholes open pathways downward. Rivers cross limestone landscapes where water can move between what we see and what we don’t.

Farther downstream, places such as Paynes Creek Historic State Park put you into the broader Peace River landscape, while the Peace River Paddling Trail lets you follow the river through the interior.

On the Peace, some of that exchange becomes part of the river’s basic hydrology.

The river doesn’t merely carry water.

It can lose it to Florida itself.

The Santa Fe: The River That Disappears

The Santa Fe is where Florida stops being subtle about all of this.

At O’Leno State Park, the river disappears underground.

Not a creek.

Not a little seasonal stream.

The Santa Fe River.

Water reaches a feature appropriately known as the River Sink and vanishes into the limestone.

Then, roughly three miles away, it returns at River Rise Preserve State Park.

Between those two points, the river continues underground through the Floridan aquifer’s karst system.

Stand at the sink and you are watching a river apparently end.

Stand at the rise and you are watching one apparently begin.

They are the same river.

The landscape between them looks like land, but hydrologically the river is still there beneath your feet.

The wider Santa Fe River corridor gives you an even better sense of how springs, river and limestone function as one connected system.

Few places explain Florida better.

What appears solid often isn’t.

What appears gone may simply have gone underground.

The St. Marks: The River Comes Back Bigger

The St. Marks performs a similar trick near Natural Bridge Battlefield Historic State Park, south of Tallahassee.

The river disappears underground and then resurfaces downstream.

But there is an additional wrinkle.

The river that comes back carries considerably more water than the river that disappeared.

Groundwater joins the system while it is underground.

Measurements cited in state management material indicate that the water entering the sink accounts for only a portion of the flow measured where the river rises again.

Think about that for a moment.

A river goes underground.

Florida adds water.

The river comes back larger.

Downstream, the system eventually reaches the Gulf around St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge, giving you an extraordinary surface journey from karst river to coastal marsh.

The limestone beneath the state isn’t merely swallowing rivers.

It is also feeding them.

That interconnectedness is one reason Florida water arguments become complicated so quickly. A river, spring, sinkhole, wetland and aquifer may look like separate things on the surface.

Underground, they may be parts of the same system.

The Aucilla: Once Isn’t Enough

Then there is the Aucilla.

Apparently disappearing once wasn’t sufficiently strange.

In the Big Bend, the Aucilla moves through one of Florida’s great karst landscapes and repeatedly interacts with sinks, underground passages and limestone openings.

Sections of the river vanish underground and reappear.

Then the process happens again.

The Aucilla River Paddling Trail gives you access to the river itself, while the surrounding Aucilla Wildlife Management Area preserves a much larger piece of the forest, wetlands and limestone country around it.

The landscape is sometimes described through the Aucilla Sinks, where the river’s course can be traced through a chain of sinkholes and openings in the forest.

This is not the Florida of broad sandy beaches and orderly canals.

It is a much older-looking place.

Limestone. Forest. Dark water. Sinkholes.

A river that seems unwilling to commit to the surface.

And because much of this happens in a relatively undeveloped part of the state, the hydrology still dominates the experience.

The road doesn’t explain the landscape.

The water does.

The Upper St. Johns: Before the River Becomes a River

There is another strange thing about the St. Johns.

Finding its beginning isn’t as straightforward as finding a little stream and declaring, “Here it is.”

The upper St. Johns emerges from an enormous marshy landscape in east-central Florida.

Water moves through wetlands and broad areas of sheetflow before gradually organizing itself into something that looks more like the river people recognize farther north.

Places such as Blue Cypress Conservation Area put you close to this very different upper-river landscape, where wetlands matter as much as a clearly defined channel.

Farther north, Lake Monroe shows what the St. Johns has become after those headwaters begin gathering themselves into a much larger system.

That is appropriate for Florida.

One of the state’s largest rivers begins not with drama but ambiguity.

Marsh becomes flow.

Flow becomes channel.

Channel becomes river.

Then that river travels hundreds of miles while dropping almost no elevation before finally meeting the Atlantic.

If you wanted to design a river specifically for Florida, you might end up with something very much like the St. Johns.

The Green Swamp: One Wet Place, Four Rivers

And finally, pull back from individual rivers and look at the Green Swamp Wilderness Preserve.

This enormous wet landscape in Central Florida doesn’t merely contain water.

It sends water outward.

The Green Swamp forms important headwaters for four major river systems: the Hillsborough, Withlacoochee, Ocklawaha and Peace.

Four rivers moving toward different parts of Florida begin in the same broad hydrologic landscape.

The Green Swamp East Tract provides another entry into that landscape, while the Withlacoochee River shows one of those headwater systems after it begins making its way toward the Gulf.

That may be the best place to end because it changes the way you think about rivers entirely.

We like maps with blue lines.

They make water look orderly.

Here is the river.

Here is the land.

Here is where one stops and the other begins.

Florida isn’t nearly that cooperative.

A swamp can be the beginning of several rivers.

A river can feed an aquifer.

An aquifer can feed a river.

A river can disappear into limestone, travel underground and emerge miles away.

Salt water can move upstream while fresh water moves toward the sea.

The lines on the map are useful.

The water doesn’t know they’re there.

Florida Underneath Florida

After a while, Florida’s strange rivers stop seeming strange.

They start seeming inevitable.

Build a state on porous limestone.

Make it extraordinarily flat.

Fill it with wetlands.

Punch holes through the rock.

Store enormous quantities of groundwater underneath it.

Surround almost the entire thing with salt water.

Then add rain.

Of course the rivers are going to behave strangely.

They are responding to a landscape that is far more complicated than its flat horizon suggests.

That may be what I like most about these places.

Florida often reveals itself reluctantly.

You can drive across it and see pine trees, pasture, subdivisions, shopping centers and water.

Lots of water.

But underneath that visible Florida is another one—a connected world of limestone passages, aquifers, springs, sinks and groundwater moving through darkness.

Every now and then a river gives the game away.

It disappears.

It comes back.

And for a moment, you get to see how Florida really works.