Wright Lake Campground at Apalachicola National Forest: January 9 - 22, 2022

After spending a timeshare week in the Orlando area, we headed north toward the Florida panhandle hoping for some cooler weather for the next couple of weeks. The weather did not disappoint with temperatures usually in the 30's at night and 60's during the day. We only had a couple of cool rainy days. Here is the rig at the Wright Lake Campground.

As I mentioned in the previous post the cell service was inadequate at Wright Lake. We could barely send and receive texts. Sending a text usually required several attempts. I was able to bike about 10 miles to get decent cell service where I could take care of any semi-urgent business requiring adequate cell service. We thought about going to the "nearby" city of Apalalachicola, about 35 miles away, to experience the local flavor in which case we could have hung around for the day and taken advantage of the cell service there. We didn't do that for various reasons such as seeing how long we could comfortably avoid going to the grocery store. We were able to avoid going to the store during our stay. One peculiarity of the location and cell service was the times on our mobile devices. The area of the forest we were staying at was right along the central and eastern zone time boundary (the boundary runs along the Apalachicola River). It seemed like whatever cell tower our mobile device would sometimes connect to wasn't consistent. So sometimes our mobile devices displayed the time per the correct eastern time and sometimes the incorrect central time. It took us awhile to come to this conclusion and until we reached it we were confused.

Wright Lake is more of a pond than a lake and wasn't very inviting, there was no sandy beach area, so I skipped doing any wading/swimming. The other places we swam in Ocala National Forest had warning signs to be aware of alligators and snakes but for some reason the warning seemed more applicable here. We didn't see anyone else in the water so that was definitely a factor. One of the most prevalent forest activities was deer hunting with the use of dogs. This was mildly unnerving since hunting dogs and hunters would frequent the campground area. The effectiveness of signs prohibiting shooting within 500 yards of the campground wasn't all that evident.

There was a 4.5 mile trail that included the campground which we walked. At times the trail was difficult to follow since the hunters, or possibly others, would carve roadways off the official forest roads and the trail would sometimes become part of these unofficial roadways and other times not. The unofficial roadways usually would dead end into a swampy area. The walking trail included one of the swampy areas that a foot bridge/log structure was constructed on that Jane was brave enough to cross. It conveniently had a hand rail to make balancing essentially a nonissue.

The area I would bike to was just outside the national forest. In that area, on one side of State Road 65 was Tate's Hell State Forest and the other was the Apalachicola River Water and Environmental Management Area. I would stop at a kiosk on the River management side when I wanted to do some tasks requiring adequate cell service. I took a picture of the billboard at the kiosk since it mentioned some of the land management that was being employed which somewhat explained what we had seen in the national forest. There were signs of land clearing and controlled burns.

What may have been different between the River Management and the national forest management was that the national forest was replanted by man after the burns for apparent future harvesting. We saw many trees marked by paint in the national forest and we saw one logging company put out their sign along one of the forest roads. We thought the marked trees were for harvesting.

 We thought the replanting by man was evident at times when we walked the forest and you see lines of trees instead of trees randomly placed by nature.

I mentioned the no shooting signs within proximity of the campground. There were dwellings throughout the forest where no shooting signs were posted as well. Maybe the dwellings were present before the national forest was established and were grandfathered after establishment of the national forest so they could remain private. We have heard of similar instances in the White Mountain National Forest although in those cases the grandfathering only applied for one family generation. Anyway, one of the dwelling included a family cemetery that was picturesque.

So all in all, the Wright Lake Campground was a very different experience than the campgrounds we used at Ocala National Forest. We took note of a campground nearby to Wright Lake called Hickory Landing. This campground is more primitive but with Wright Lake's facilities available for showers and replenishment nearby so we put it on the list to consider for the future. Hickory Landing is right on the Apalachicola River but most of the campsites were not on the river banks. The Hickory Landing fee is only $3/day or $1.50/day with the national park pass. We weren't sure there was anyone checking if visitors were paying the fee since there was no campground host like at Wright Lake. The Wright Lake host was apparently very vigilant since he asked me to pay the $3/day use fee at Wright Lake one morning when I was returning from my jog and heading toward the bathhouse. Once he realized I was camping at Wright Lake I went on my way.

Our next stop is to stay at my sister's time share in the Orlando area. We will be with her the whole week and visiting with my brother and his wife part of the time. My sister is vacationing from NJ and my brother lives in the Orlando area. After that we will are scheduled to camp at one of the Withlacoochee State Forest campgrounds and my next post should be about our experience there.