The Timucuan Preserve and the Trail to Theodore Roosevelt

Where the Salt Marsh Meets Ten Thousand Years of History

The Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve covers 46,000 acres of wetlands, waterways, and upland forest on Jacksonville's northeast side, and it is the largest urban park in the contiguous United States that most Americans have never heard of. I visited the Theodore Roosevelt Area - a 600-acre tract on the south bank of the Fort George River - on a Wednesday morning in March, when the salt marsh was green and gold and the air smelled like pluff mud and the ocean and something floral I could not identify but later learned was the blooming marsh elder.

The trailhead is at the end of Mount Pleasant Road, past a small parking lot that holds maybe twenty cars. On a Wednesday morning, there were four. The trail system is a series of loops totaling about four miles through maritime hammock forest - a dense canopy of live oak, red cedar, and cabbage palm draped in Spanish moss so thick it looks like the trees are wearing shawls. The understory is saw palmetto and beautyberry, and the light that reaches the forest floor is green and filtered and has the quality of light in a greenhouse.

I took the Willie Browne Trail, the longest loop, which winds through the hammock and then opens onto a bluff overlooking the Fort George River. The view from the bluff is the payoff - an expanse of salt marsh stretching to the far shore, the grass rippling in the wind like the surface of a lake, great blue herons standing at intervals like sentries. At low tide, the mud flats are exposed, and fiddler crabs emerge in thousands, waving their single oversized claw in a gesture that is either aggressive or romantic and is possibly both.

The Timucuan people lived here for thousands of years before European contact, and the middens - shell mounds built from generations of oyster harvests - are visible along the trail as low, rounded hills among the oaks. Some are thirty feet high and contain layers of shell, bone, and pottery that archaeologists have dated to 4,000 years ago. You walk over them without realizing it, unless you stop and look at the trail surface, where fragments of shell - whelk, oyster, clam - are mixed into the sandy soil, a record of meals eaten by people who stood on this same bluff and watched the same marsh and the same herons.

The trail is flat, well-marked, and manageable for any fitness level. Bring bug spray - the mosquitoes in the hammock are enthusiastic and numerous, especially in summer. The best seasons are fall through spring, when the temperatures are comfortable and the biting insects have reduced their operations. There is no entry fee. There is no gift shop. There is a parking lot, a trailhead kiosk, and 600 acres of forest and marsh that have been here since long before the city that surrounds them, and will be here, I suspect, long after.