Bart Smith and Sandra Friend

Nearly seven years ago, I met Seattle photographer Bart Smith at an FTA Annual Conference, where he’d come looking for me. He wanted to collaborate on a coffee table book about the Florida Trail, and I was all for it. The result of our partnership was Along the Florida Trail. Bart thru-hiked, keeping me posted on what he was seeing along the way, and I went out and did section hikes with friends. We met up in a few places, like the Big O Hike, to hike together.

I found out this spring from Bart’s wife, Bridgie, that Bart had almost met his goal of hiking ALL of the National Scenic Trails. What a feat! Today Bart met his goal: all trails complete! He wrapped up his hike of the CDT in Yellowstone.  Here’s the story.

His website’s gorgeous, with slide shows from every National Scenic Trail. I contributed the written content about the trails.  Bart’s website: Walking Down A Dream.

As in Old South Bar-B-Que! The new owners of the Clewiston Inn have found the chef and recovered the recipes from one of Clewiston’s other long-time traditions, the Old South Bar-B-Que, and it’s being served right now at the Clewiston Inn’s Colonial Room.  The cornbread is soft like it’s made with cake flour, the ribs are smoky and succulent, and the 12-cheese macaroni and cheese could be a meal onto itself. Don’t wait, get to Clewiston and savor this Florida original again…I know I will!

In a move that is simply mindblowing in its proportions, U.S. Sugar just announced that it is willing to sell 187,000 acres to the state of Florida for $1.75 billion for Everglades restoration. This would encompass the vast tracts of sugar cane south of Clewiston towards Alligator Alley, and if the deal goes through, would mean the end of sugar production in Clewiston: a staggering economic blow to this historic community, which, if it takes a full five years, could be mitigated in part by working with residents to ramp up ecotourism. Once again, when restoration is complete, Clewiston and South Bay would have the Everglades at their doorstep.  As a avid “Big O” hiker, I’ll be watching this one closely!  I found this breaking story in Florida Trend  (from the St. Petersburg Times)

Randy Wayne White does Sanibel and Pine Island Sound proud with his novel Dark Light, #13 in the Doc Ford series.  Now I’ve loved Randy’s work since I came across it almost a decade ago in a small downtown bookstore in Fort Myers, but it’s been a while since I’ve picked up another book in the series, and my time for reading has been so compressed of late, it was a joy to tote this book through airline terminals and the Ozarks as a way to wrap each evening. With a storyline that is firmly fixed on his local stomping grounds, and a genuine sense of post-hurricane trauma (I know, I saw what happened to Pineland just a few weeks after Charley), this book is highly charged with suspense. I love the intertwining of history, of the rich and famous, industrialists and authors, who were a major part of Sanibel and Fort Myers during the 1930s and 1940s.  If you haven’t read a Doc Ford novel yet, you’re missing out. 

The joy of spending an evening just meandering around the Internet is to find unexpected treasures. I have several articles to write, but needed some “downtime” after finishing the first. A chain of searches led me down the garden path (or the trail less traveled) to Florida Nature, a blog established this past February by one of my favorite Florida authors, Bill Belleville.  It’s a joyful series of essays. Take a look!