Ichetucknee Springs State Park in Columbia County, Florida

Photograph: Head Spring.jpg by Pengd0t · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Restored from the credited Wikimedia Commons file, normalized to the consistent attraction-card frame and converted to WebP by 1stFlorida.com. Portrait originals retain their complete composition over a softly blurred extension of the same photograph.

Columbia County attraction

Ichetucknee Springs State Park

Columbia County · North Florida & First Coast

Eight springs join to make a six-mile river so clear that people float it on inner tubes all summer.

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ABOUT THIS PLACE

Ichetucknee Springs State Park lies about four miles northwest of Fort White, and the state park service gives its size as 2,669 acres. Eight major springs rise inside the park and join to form the Ichetucknee River, which runs six miles to the Santa Fe. The water holds 72 degrees the year round. The upper run was made a National Natural Landmark in October 1971, and the park lists fifteen separate natural communities inside its boundary. This ground was not always protected. Phosphate was dug here from before 1900, first by hand and later by machine, and the Loncala Phosphate Company owned it through the 1950s and 1960s while tubing on the river was becoming a local habit. Loncala sold the land to Florida in 1970 to keep the spring run intact. Tubing runs from the Friday before Memorial Day into early September, and the park closes entrances when it reaches capacity, so arriving early matters on a summer weekend. Outside tube season people paddle, swim, snorkel and dive, and Blue Hole stays at 72 degrees all year. Otters, beaver, gar, softshell turtles, wild turkey, wood ducks and limpkins live along the river, and manatees come up in winter. A seventeenth-century Spanish mission site sits inside the park. The gate opens at 8 in the morning and closes at sundown

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Get Directions ↗Official place website ↗

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