Mike Roess Gold Head Branch State Park

ABOUT THIS PLACE

Mike Roess Gold Head Branch State Park covers about 2,400 acres in Clay County on State Road 21, between Gainesville and Jacksonville. It was established in 1935, which makes it one of the oldest state parks in Florida, and it was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2020. The ground here is rolling sandhill, scrub, marsh, ravine and lake rather than flat pine. At the heart of it is a steephead ravine where springs seep out in a gully of ferns and gather into Gold Head Branch, which over a very long time cut the ravine and formed Little Lake Johnson and Big Lake Johnson, joined by a stretch of prairie. Men of Civilian Conservation Corps Company 2444 built much of what visitors still use: cabins with fireplaces and screened porches, a bathhouse on Little Lake Johnson, stone picnic tables, a rolling concrete sidewalk and hand-cut limestone stairs down into the ravine. Nearly seven miles of the Florida Trail cross the park with three trailheads, and the Ridge and Ravine trails lead to the steephead itself. There is a seven-mile horse trail as well. People swim and rent canoes at Little Lake Johnson, fish, and stay in two campgrounds or at a primitive backpacking site. Fox squirrels, bald eagles, wild turkey, gopher tortoises and white-tailed deer live here. The park opens at 8 in the morning and closes at sundown, every day of the year