Myakka River, Florida's Only Wild and Scenic River

Nine miles east of the Interstate, the Florida that existed before Florida begins. Myakka River State Park covers thirty-seven thousand acres of wet prairie, pine flatwoods, hammock, and river marsh, and it is one of the oldest state parks in Florida. Its origin is tangled up with a cattle queen, a New Deal labor corps, and a river whose name came from a Seminole man talking to a surveyor in the eighteen fifties.

Before that conversation, English maps called it the Asternal River. The Seminole name, which translates roughly as big waters, suited the river better. The Myakka drains a wide, flat basin that floods dramatically during summer rains and contracts to dark, slow channels in winter, creating radically different landscapes within the same park depending on when you arrive.

Bertha Palmer ran cattle on this land in the nineteen tens, importing Brahma bulls and experimenting with the latest livestock science across the same prairies where roseate spoonbills now wade through the shallows. When she died in nineteen eighteen, her land eventually passed to state ownership. During the Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps built the park's cabins, picnic shelters, and early roads, completing the work in time for the park's official opening in nineteen forty-one.

The Florida legislature designated the Myakka a Wild and Scenic River in nineteen eighty-five, making it the only river in Florida to carry that protected status. The designation acknowledged what anyone who has paddled the upper river knows: this is a genuinely wild waterway within an hour's drive of a major city. American alligators are abundant. Sandhill cranes, wood storks, anhingas, and the roseate spoonbill, one of Florida's most spectacular birds, use the river and its wetlands year-round. Myakka is not a manicured park. It is a working piece of old Florida that somehow survived.