Spring time!: Florida's high springs

By CHRISTOPHER PERCY COLLIER | The New York Times

June 8, 2008

It's a warm late-winter afternoon in northern Florida, and three young women are gingerly descending a half-dozen wooden stairs to a mouthwash-blue pool of translucent water ringed with cypress trees. Yesterday, they paddled the Ichetucknee River, a clear, narrow stream fed almost exclusively by nine major springs. Today, at this popular swimming hole in the town of High Springs, they want full immersion.

After taking a deep breath, Beth Ann Rutledge of Tallahassee swims down into the pool, an earthen cavity called Ginnie Spring that discharges approximately 30 million gallons of water per day, feeding the cola-colored Santa Fe River.

Passing a couple of fish, she reaches the entry point to the spring's source, an aquifer that connects to scores of other springs through a network of underwater caves. She touches a toe to the white sandy bottom, and, in a cloud of bubbles, kicks back to the surface. "I did it!" she announces after her head pops up.

Twenty yards away, a volleyball game is under way. Wet suits and scuba gear are strewn across a picnic table. A short distance farther, wooded campsites are thick with tents. A sign at a restaurant and dive shop depicts a mermaid with long blond hair blown back, not unlike the fluorescent-green aquatic eel grass that crops up beside these northern Florida springs, ever-bent by the continuous outward flow of water.

Visit the natural freshwater springs of northern Florida, and you may find it impossible to resist plunging in, or at least riding along the surface in a kayak or tube. Typically surrounded by trees and lush vegetation, the springs are often an eerily beautiful blue or green. Some are so clear that kayakers photographed on them appear as if they were floating on air.

The purity of the water at Ginnie Spring has attracted the Coca-Cola Co., which has a permit to extract up to 600,000 gallons a day from a deeply placed well there and bottles some of it as Dasani water. And with water temperatures a cool 68 to 72 degrees, these alluring springs are unlikely spots for a meeting with an alligator.

Locals' playgrounds

At least eight billion gallons of water a day gush up out of the Floridan aquifer, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, mostly in northern and central Florida, which has one of the largest concentrations of springs in the world.

At Rum Island Springs, a cabin can be rented for the weekend beside a turquoise pool of water twice the size of a large Jacuzzi. Poe Springs, in a 200-acre Alachua County park, has concrete steps leading into clear blue water. Blue Spring, Naked Spring, Johnson Spring and Kiefer Spring are all accessible from the privately owned Blue Springs swimming area in High Springs. More springs are preserved in more than a dozen state parks, including Troy, Manatee, Ponce de Leon and Wakulla Springs.

Ginnie Spring is the anchor of Ginnie Springs Outdoors, described on its Web site as a campground and dive resort.

On a paddle upstream from there on the Santa Fe, along the Santa Fe Canoe Trail, a dozen more springs show themselves before flowing into the sluggish river. Its wooded banks are sparsely dotted with docks, lawn chairs and the occasional house. (Along this river passage, alligator sightings are considered one of the attractions, and swimming is not advised.)

The canoe trip ends at O'Leno State Park, where the Santa Fe emerges from the ground after flowing for three miles underground.

Ginnie Spring is in High Springs (population 3,600), a town with a historic district, craftsman homes and antiques shops that has also become the state's unofficial natural springs capital, a base for weekenders and vacationers. The town has two dive shops, canoe and kayak outfitters and tube rental establishments. The Great Outdoors, a new restaurant, bottles a beer called Naked Ed Ale, named for Ed Watts, who for 20 years has greeted visitors to the lovely Lilly Spring clad in only a necklace, wire-rimmed glasses and a loin cloth.

High Springs is also the headquarters of a film production company specializing in high-definition underwater cinematography. Its owner, Wes Skiles, has shot underwater scenes for Imax, National Geographic and PBS. A loyalist to the Florida springs, he prevailed upon Sony Pictures to hold the premiere of The Cave, a horror film for which he did underwater shots, in High Springs.

"For water, springs are a way out," Skiles said while negotiating the Santa Fe in his motorboat. "But they also have a way of drawing people in."

Saving the springs

More recently, emphasis has shifted toward conservation. Drive down these rural farm roads and you'll come upon small blue signs indicating you are coming into a Springs Conservation Area. Planning to tube the Ichetucknee? Get there early. The number of users permitted on the river is limited, and rules spell out what can be taken along.

"College kids used to float kegs of beer down here," Bee Gee Wolfe, a canoeist, said at the put-in to the Ichetucknee. "Now it's much more of an eco-tour."

Back near the Santa Fe River late in the day, Skiles and his diving partner, Tom Morris, tramped through muddy woods in full scuba gear, searching for a fissure.

Skiles had been to this spot once before — in a boat, when the woods were flooded.

"There it is," he said, and they stood before a kiddie pool-sized hole filled with dark water. Morris, holding a reel of string tied at one end to a cypress knee, dropped down into the water and disappeared.

Soon bubbles emerged from the dark water, and Morris' head popped up. "There's nothing down there," he announced.

"Yeah, right!" Skiles bantered back, as if he'd played this game before. And he had. He and his tribe of divers have discovered more than 100 springs and cave systems in the area, some murky like this.

There are no plans to name a beer after him. Even here in springs country, it's Caribbean-blue water that is king.