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A few, and one is a real surprise in a flat state.
Falling Waters State Park near Chipley in Washington County has Florida's highest waterfall: a small stream drops 73 feet into a round sinkhole about 100 feet deep and 20 feet across. How much water goes over depends on recent rain, so go after a wet spell. Steinhatchee Falls in Taylor County is the opposite kind, a small fall where the Steinhatchee River spills across a wide limestone ledge only a few feet high. For moving water, Big Shoals State Park on the Suwannee River near White Springs has the largest whitewater rapids in Florida, rated Class III when the river stands between 59 and 61 feet above sea level, under limestone bluffs that rise 80 feet from the bank.
Washington County. The falls drop seventy-three feet into a sinkhole a hundred feet deep, and then the water is gone. It disappears into a cavern at the bottom of the sink and nobody has traced where it goes from there.
Open the guide →Taylor County. Wide is the word, not tall. The tannic river has cut across a shelf of coastal limestone, and the drop is four to five feet when the water is low and almost invisible when the water is high, so paddlers sometimes glide over the ledge without noticing it.
Open the guide →Hamilton County. Big Shoals State Park is at 18738 Southeast 94th Street in White Springs, north of Lake City, and it holds something Florida is not supposed to have: whitewater. The Suwannee drops over a shelf of rock here in the largest series of rapids in the state.
Open the guide →Florida has one of the larger state park systems in the country and a dozen or so carry a full day on their own.
Camping on the sand itself is not permitted in Florida, but a number of parks put you a short walk behind the dune, and those sites book out months ahead.
By car, through one of three entrances in three different cities, which do not connect to each other inside the park: the Homestead entrance, which leads down the main park road to Flamingo on the coast; the Miami entrance at Shark Valley, with trails, an observation tower and tram tours; and the Everglades City entrance on the Gulf coast, for boat tours and the mangrove waterways.
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