Yes, you can electric bike the Lake Okeechobee Scenic Trail. Frankly, it’s about the only way for us regular plebs to do the dang thing! Previous record: 100 miles in a day. New record: 115 miles in a day around the largest body of freshwater in the Southeastern US. The Okeechobee Scenic Trail is a mostly paved (yes, you read that right) trail around the entirety of that big, shallow blue circle at the bottom of Florida. The sections that aren’t paved are various levels of gravel, all easy biking except the poorly maintained ~20 miles of gravel two track running on the western side from Okeechobee down to the Sam Griffith Overlook (27.000062, -81.068325). This section is bike-able by non-super athletes, but it’s kind of annoying, and it’s recommended you do that first, when you’re fresh by riding the lake counter clockwise. We rode that section the first day as a test, so when we rode clockwise around the lake we stayed on the levee until we got to that point, and then we got out on 78, which has a wide shoulder, to ride back in the dark rather than attempt that overgrown mess full of coyotes and gators and hogs at night. While the official tally is 109 miles for the trail, a realistic day ride which includes stopping for food and orienteering is closer to 115-120 miles round trip, (assuming no sections of the levee are closed – be sure to check online that everything’s open to ride on before you go!).
The terrain is flat with mild up and down grades, except where you have to go around the locks and other water control structures going into the lake and at that point you’ll have to get out on the road most of the time and at times ride up and over elevated bridges (i.e. Florida mountains). There is some orienteering involved – one pedestrian bridge around a water control structure was closed, and the rest you have to stop and kind of figure out how to get around. There is always a way, but sometimes, particularly just east of Okeechobee, you may have a fair bit of road riding (1-3 miles) to make it happen. A few locks were open and you could ride right across and keep going. On the western side the trail leaves the levee and there’s a sign that says “trail end” at the junction but the trail doesn’t end, it turns right and leaves the levee. From there it rides along the road for about 10 miles on a dedicated paved trail. A shorter section just west of Okeechobee if you’re riding counter clockwise has the trail dead end into the road and a double orange blaze on a power pole indicates the trail turns onto the road, heads south, and then can be rejoined once you reach a trailer park retirement community by riding down to the park and up onto the levee on a gravel two track blocked by a gate marked as the “Florida Scenic Trail” of which the Lake Okeechobee Scenic Trail is a part. Otherwise, everything is on the levee.
While it is possible to hike this trail the sheer monotony of it (plus the hot asphalt) makes it not exactly appealing for slow speed travel like hiking. We did see one person camped at a lone picnic shelter around the lake that might have been a thru hiker. Camping is officially allowed on the trail and there are several developed campgrounds around the rim. Supposedly there’s a facebook group that maintains water caches around the lake for hikers too. However, neither the lake nor the adjoining canals/creeks are recommended as sources of drinking water even with water filtration. The lake is well known for its high levels of phosphorus and other agricultural pollution as well as toxic algae blooms that release a poison that can cause kidney failure in humans. If that’s not enough to warn you off you can also know you’re drinking water from a lake with a 30 year history of illegal bulk tire dumping and that an alligator might bite off your arm while you’re trying to get a drink. Which leads me to the next point – you can’t swim in this lake unless you want to feed the gators, get sick from the algae, or otherwise expire. Instead, hit up one of several parks around the lake for free drinking water at the restroom water fountains or hit a gas station in one of the several surrounding small towns.
Though be warned, this is a large lake that attracts fishermen and not much else, don’t expect it to be touristy like Palm Beach or Fort Myers. The vast majority of the lake rim is rural farm land raising either cattle or sugar cane, which while scenic makes this paved trail actually remote, rural, and nearly backcountry – there are long distances between water and food sources. This means you’ll get a ton of wildlife for a paved path, but you’re also at the mercy of the people, wildlife, and elements. Pahookee/Canal Point are rough towns full of rough people but they have a variety of lunch options. Okeechobee is a hard drinking fishermen spot, but it does have a Publix and a Walmart plus that huge KOA practically across the road from the trail. Moor Haven actually seems pretty safe and is a large town with food options. Buckhead Ridge is a nice little retirement community of trailers with a good Dollar Tree. There’s nothing to eat in Lake Port if you’re thinking about lunching halfway, you’ll need to eat before or afterwards. Otherwise, the other towns are either too far off the trail or inconsequential. There is no food directly adjacent to the trail – you’ll have to get off to get anything. Water can be accessed directly adjacent via those parks previously mentioned, as can restroom facilities because that levee is wide open. There are no trees to pee behind here!
Along with the challenges previously mentioned there is also the environment. The lake is basically a humid desert – you need to get serious about sun protection from start to finish of the ride. This is the only place other than the desert in Utah I ended up with severe sunburn on my lips. As in swollen to the point I looked like I had gone south to Florida to get lip filler put in instead of ride a bike. You’ll want to dress like the desert – long sleeves or arm covers, closed toe shoes, bike gloves, neck gator, a brim on your helmet if you have it, and long pants. Anything exposed needs 50-75 spf water proof sunscreen applied every 4-5 hours of the ride. Buy the 30 spf lip balm from CVS in Okeechobee. Wear sunglasses. This is a backcountry trail, regardless of how developed it looks and deserves respect if you don’t want a whole body sunburn or sun poisoning halfway through your epic ride. Remember to sunscreen the top of your head too because that helmet has holes! Temperature wise in October it was still running 87-90F in the hottest part of the day – if you’re coming down here from up north that is going to be a major temperature shock, plan time to acclimatize.
All the technical details over, suffice it to say that despite the flat pavement running to the horizon on this ride, it’s not a boring bike ride for a 10-16 hour marathon pedal. You’ll see the physical flood control infrastructure of the dike (and ride across a lot of it) including locks, pumping stations, what I think are dike monitoring stations with solar panels, the rim canal, piles of rock supplies for the dike, drainage canals, and of course the dike itself. On the western side vast cattle ranches with bos indicus and bos indicus cross cattle (think Brahmin) provide scenic vistas of multi colored cattle under palm trees. To the south US Sugar, a vast sugarcane growing enterprise, has fields of sugar cane to the horizon. When they are burning the cane as part of harvest the smoke produced can be so large that it spans a significant part of the horizon and spawns clouds in the upper atmosphere. There are some orange groves and banana trees, along with a huge selection of palms. Air boats can be spotted on the northwestern side of the lake, and we saw a float plane on the eastern side. There were swampy buggies behind hauled on the road, but we never saw one in action.
Wildlife you can see (and which we saw) includes hogs, snakes, gators cruising out on the water, apple snails, non native iguanas, and coyotes. None of these critters were on top of the dike, they stayed to the edge of the swamp and the water, so forget about running over a gator’s tail while riding. A portion of the northeastern dike was heavily marked by coyote scat where I guess Florida real estate is hot even for the coyotes. PRO TIP: Apple snails are really attractive critters, but in Florida they can carry rat lungworm, a potentially fatal human zoonotic parasite. The parasite can be contracted by consumption of the snail or accidental intake of its associated slime. Handling live snails or their very attractive and large shells and not washing your hands afterwards is a bad idea. I did pick up two shells that were dry and out of water…and found out about this later. The parasite survives up to 72 hrs after the snail’s death if the shell is in the water, and a shorter period of time if the shell is dry. I’m not dead, but then again, I was lucky to pick up dry shells that had been out in the sun for some time before I found them!
Along with terrestrial wildlife the lake is a bird mecca. Birds are everywhere – I personally spotted 2 wood storks, great blue herons, tricolored herons, great egrets, clouds of cattle egrets, white ibis, osprey, a belted kingfisher, a load of common grackles, 3 turkeys, black head vultures, turkey vultures, and lots of anhingas out fishing and drying their wings. PRO TIP: bring binoculars! It saves on arguing about whether that’s a log or a gator floating out in the lake.
Of course, the least popular wildlife for us was the massive Florida mosquitos. The mosquitos start about sunset and continue into the early morning hours – they are huge, have a painful bite, and come in clouds. If you ride at least 10 mph you’ll be able to avoid being bitten, but time your battery changes carefully if you don’t want to be drained of blood. I have been told they are also attracted to expensive sunscreen, so buy generic if you can. The one camper we saw had erected a mosquito net around a picnic table in order to eat dinner in peace.
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Is it goat approved? I’m adding this because, due to the actually relatively remote nature of this trail, I think you could seriously hike this with a goat. Now, this is the land of alligators, so you’ll need some precautions plus the goat will have to carry its own water, but there’s plenty of grass on the dike and nobody much around in the off season. They don’t allow horses, but a dog sized goat would probably make the grade.
How you get there: Personally, we stayed at the Okeechobee KOA because it’s right across the road almost from the trail and the parking lot for the trail in Lake Okeechobee closes at midnight – which means you could get back late, exhausted, and not be able to get your car out to drive back to the hotel. It’s not fancy, but it’s not a bad spot. If you’re expecting kids on banana bikes and families this one has a bar and seems to cater more to men who want to fish, golf as a break from fishing, and park their wives and girlfriends at the campground’s large pool. Not a bad scene, but different from what I usually get when I go suburban and rent a spot at a KOA.
Time for the ride: Officially 109 miles in a loop around the lake and some adjacent swamp. In reality closer to 115-120 miles as you have to get off to eat if you didn’t bring all your food and to get off for water unless you’re towing a trailer. We averaged about 3 gallons of water and Gatorade for the ride per person. That’s 21lb of weight you’d rather carry in portions instead of all at once and only continue carrying till you stop at the local restroom.
Best season to ride: The coolest season you can afford. While January and December will offer you the coolest temperatures, they also offer you the highest rates for places to stay. June through November is hurricane season, so your trip may be cancelled, but October and November will offer you the lowest cost in terms of accommodations and other expenses in town during the year. Plus the trail, which is already fairly lightly travelled will be deserted – we went 20-30 miles at times without seeing anyone at all on the trail. On the entire trip excepting the big park in Okeechobee we saw maybe 20 people. If that. There was only one other long distance cyclist.
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Route to Ride
Starting in Okeechobee at the north top of the lake we rode clockwise around the lake. If you want to ride the whole lake in a single day and you are not willing to ride on the road after it gets dark I highly recommend riding the lake counter clockwise because as mentioned earlier the worst section of gravel is in the northwestern corner of the lake. It’s over grown and not somewhere you would want to try and ride after dark in alligator hell.
We started off at the Lake Okeechobee Park. This has a large parking area, but the parking area closes at midnight and doesn’t open till the morning, so it’s advisable to stay in town nearby if you think you’ll be back late as you could end up with your car stuck in the parking area. The park has a fishing pier and an abundance of water birds and grackles. There’s also a restroom, but I did not see a water source. You’ll need to hit the gas station across the road for that.
Heading east the levee runs through the park and then you ride along the levee which is paved until you reach the Taylor Creek Access Point. At which point you’ll need to get on the road (441) and ride across the car bridge. On most of the ride you’ll be able to ride out to the road, ride across a bridge, then immediately ride back and get back on the trail. However, here it won’t be so easy due to restricted access (there’s a gate that was closed when we were riding). Instead, you’ll need to ride down the road to the Nubbin Slough Boat Launch at 27.192949, -80.763729 to get back on the levee.
You’ll get back on the levee and keep riding. The ring canal will be on your left, the lake on your right as you cross a lock near a boat ramp, and keep on riding. You’ll see yellow writing on the pavement (E35…). This appears to be some kind of mile marker, as the number counts down as you ride and each marker is a mile apart. Based on a rough estimate this is the mileage from your point down to the Army Corps of Engineers Headquarters, which is further down the lake and will be passed on the ride. You’ll also see scat probably from coyotes religiously deposited at relatively even intervals along the dike. Because coyotes don’t have purple spray paint or pink marker tape to mark their property.
You’ll come up to the Chancey Bay Boat Lock which allows boats to move from the rim canal into the main lake and vice versa. Somewhere around here you’ll start hitting sections of trail that are gravel two track. Trucks do drive on the trail as the levee usually has some kind of maintenance going on, so keep an eye out. One snuck up on us and honked and I about rode down the side of the levee.
Port Mayaca Lock and Dam is a particularly large lock leading into the lake from a connecting canal. The name originates from a group of Native Americans that once lived in the area. You cannot ride over this lock, and will instead have to ride over the elevated car bridge and then around and under the bridge to get back on the trail. Note that the spot to get back onto the trail is on a blind corner on a road where 18 wheelers come around the corner at 60 mph. Seriously, person I was with almost bought it because they didn’t see the truck coming around the corner. Very fortunately the truck saw them!
After Port Mayaca the rim canal dwindles to a weedy ditch and the ride continues. You’ll cross over various water control structures and pumping stations, and pass what appears to be groves of citrus trees. At Canal Point Recreation Area you’ll have to get out on 98 to go around the lock again, but stop to check out the railroad bridge crossing the canal, which can be turned to allow boats to pass. You can run Lakeshore Drive and pop back on the levee trail shortly after crossing the bridge. The trail here is gravel, but fine gravel, not big stones. The general area is a little rough and impoverished, so stick to the levee unless you’re hungry, in which case you’ll want to not get back on the levee at Canal Point Recreation Area and instead navigate the parallel car roads into town and the local restaurants, gas station, and Dollar General. Again, not exactly a high rent district, so choose your spot to stop with care. We stopped at a gas station Subway, which wasn’t half bad, but I came out to find a swamp person complete with a giant glass coffee table statue of buddha on a rope around his neck regaling the person I was riding with with all the awesome ways to die that exist in Florida. Honestly I’d trust the alligators more than that individual. Needless to say this an interesting area and not in a good way.
You can get back on the trail at the fancy Pahokee Marina, which is probably the nicest thing in Pahokee. There is a campground right along the lake here too, just below the levee for those in search of alternative places to stay that are right at the trail besides the Okeechobee KOA. The levee is once again paved, and now you’re headed for real towards the bottom of the lake. If they’re burning sugar cane at the US Sugar farm at the bottom of the lake you’ll be able to see the massive fires from here off in the distance on the horizon. One of the ones we saw was so large it spawned an upper atmosphere cloud from the ash and moisture rising from the fields. You’ll start seeing large piles of stone along the levee in places – near as I can tell these are stock piles for future needs for emergency repairs, etc. to the levee. Some appear to be local limestone, which is pretty cool to stop and check out.
As you ride you’ll enter into the area of the sugar cane fields, which are uniform man high cane fields stretching to beyond the horizon. You’ll come up on the Paul Rardin Park, which has a restroom (and probably a water fountain, but I did not confirm) should you need the facilities. From here on we started seeing more alligators too after a morning of pretty sparse spotting at the north eastern end of the lake. Keep an eye out for the gators cruising by out on the lake. The lake itself is usually only about 13 foot deep at it’s deepest point, and can only get up to 18.5 foot deep before the dike is in danger of failing, so gators don’t have to work really hard to get around on most of the water.
You’ll keep riding past sugar cane till you reach Torrey Island and the swing bridge that allows access to it. There’s a campground here as well and apparently an observation tower, though due to time limitations we did not explore the island and go see it. Around here was the worst gate on the ride – most of the gates had little passes for bikers and hikers, but this gate was so tight to the guard rails we had to lay the bikes down and drag them under the gate – not fun to put it mildly.
You’ll get down to the South Bay Boat ramp and then the levee makes an obvious turn and heads along the bottom of Lake Okeechobee. Near here within easy riding distance is more food and gas stations if needed. The rim canal remerged as a stretch of water between the levee and Torrey Island near the air strip, and now the levee continues along the rim canal and the edge of the island/swamp land the separates the canal from the lake proper. When you reach John Stretch Park you’ll have another restroom with a working water fountain to visit if needed right along the edge of the levee, and then it’s back to the never ending sugar cane, sometimes with what looks like refineries in the distance.
The rim canal will continue, with the lake on the other side till you get up to Clewiston, which is a fairly large town. The lake disappears in the distance and is replaced by the rim canal being backed by swamp and palm trees. There’s a large lock here that you’ll need to ride down to the road to get around again, and at the point you’ll pass the headquarters of the Army Corps of Engineers. You’ll have to navigate your way through the city streets back up the levee after crossing the car bridge. It’s in the vicinity of this town that I found empty apple snail shells – again see the introduction on warnings about handling these snails and their shells.
From here you’ll continue to ride and the number of alligators floating around started to go up, though whether that was due to the time of day or the location I don’t know. At least one young alligator ran for it from the bank near us, and we also spotted a wood stork and a coyote through here along with more common birds and wildlife. Keep riding as you’ll now have the rim canal on the inside of the levee and another stretch of water on the outside. There are locks and pumping stations as you ride, until you start to turn the corner and come up into Moor Haven, a town that was devastated by catastrophic flooding before the building of the modern levee. The Moor Haven lock and dam requires another detour out to the car road, over a very tall raised bridge that has a walled sidewalk across it, then back up First Street, right on Canal Street and onto the levee.
You keep on riding up the levee until you reach 26.924819, -81.122296. Here a sign says the trail ends and the levee continues, crossing Hwy 78. Instead of continuing on the levee you turn right and descend onto a specialized paved bike path that parallels 78. In this general vicinity we encountered a real cowboy on a horse with a big rifle and another buddy of his crouched in the grass, also with a big rifle, facing the swamp from the top of the levee with the sun setting. Surreal thing to run up on, glad whatever they had gathered to do combat with wasn’t me!
You’ll keep riding along the road until the levee comes back at 26.970904, -81.117522, at which point you’ll get back on up on the levee to your right and keep riding. You can ride through the next lock/pumping station, but when you get up the next one (26.999346, -81.069187) you have a choice to make. If it’s near dusk ride down 78 back to Okeechobee on the relatively wide shoulder. If it’s not dusk, you’re about to start the hardest section of gravel two track on the ride. Use 78 to cross over, then turn right and go back up to the levee. Here the trail degrades to rough, overgrown gravel. We saw turkey on this section of the route as well as snakes. Airboats use a route adjacent to the levee and can be heard long before they are seen they are so ridiculously loud. There’s a couple small boat landing like areas, and they have something marked as Big Bear Beach on Google, but there’s nowhere I would describe as a beach and certainly many, many reasons to never go swimming or sunbathing on this route!
You get up to Indian Prairie Canal and you’ll have to go back on 78 and go around to continue as you have many times before at this point. You’ll keep riding down the rough partially overgrown gravel till you reach Buckhead, where the trail comes up and dead ends into the Southern Sun RV Park. Just south of this park is a Dollar Tree if you’re needing supplies. You’ll get back out on 78 and cross the Kissimee River, which along with Fish-eating Creek is a major source of natural water flow into Lake Okeechobee. You’ll have to ride a little ways along 78 till you reach 27.152743, -80.867194 where you can turn right and get back on the levee. Now it’s paved, easy going, and watch for alligators in the rim canal between the levee and the cattle pastures and RV parks. Then you’re back at the Lake Okeechobee Park and it’s time to find the car and find somewhere to get off that bike!
In sum: Looks like a paved country park trail when you first get on it. Rides like a 16 hour hell trip through a burning desert filled with poisonous water and carnivorous wildlife. Appearances can be deceiving.
packgoats 