Connecting With A Live Wildly Adventurist

Wet trails, old trees, and the kind of conversations that happen while walking

August 15, 2026

There is something very different about getting to know someone on a trail. Coffee shops are fine. Restaurants are fine. Bars are fine. But all of those places come with a kind of social choreography. You sit across from one another. You make eye contact. You take turns talking. Someone eventually brings a check.

On a trail, you walk. You look around. You stop when something catches your attention. The conversation wanders right along with you.

That was part of what I enjoyed about spending a morning at Hillsborough River State Park with Ryan Worthington, better known as the Florida Excursionist. Ryan is also a Live Wildly Adventurist and co-host of the Mad Caps podcast, and this was one of the first times we had gotten out into the field together. I did not want the morning to feel like a formal meeting disguised as a hike. Thankfully, it did not.

We met around 8:30 on an August morning and headed out expecting something reasonably dry. Florida had other plans. The skies were clear, there was enough breeze to make the heat tolerable, and the air had that familiar August humidity that makes everything feel slightly damp before you even begin sweating. The trails were wetter than expected, and in a few places we ended up wading through shallow water nearly to our calves.

So much for the dry hike.

Ryan and I notice different things in the woods, which I liked. I tend to lock onto plants and animals. I am scanning for a bird I have not photographed, a plant I need reference images for, some leaf shape I do not recognize, movement in the understory, whatever might eventually become part of the Florida Field Guide.

Ryan seemed more tuned into the physical environment itself. At one point he stopped because steam was rising off the bark of a cypress tree. Later, where the trail crossed through shallow tannic water, he noticed bubbles rising through the sand underneath. There were several little points where air was coming up through the submerged trail, and we stopped to look at them and wonder what was happening beneath our feet.

Those are the kinds of things I could easily walk past while staring into the trees for a bird. That is one of the benefits of walking with someone else. You borrow their attention for a while.

The conversation was just as wide-ranging. Ryan is deeply involved with Florida's springs and the Florida Springs Council, so I had plenty of questions. We talked about water quality, what is happening at places like Poe Springs, whether damaged systems can recover, and the different organizations trying to raise awareness before more of Florida's springs cross some invisible line that becomes very difficult to walk back from. There is plenty of doom available in conversations about Florida conservation. I am interested in the work people are actually doing about it. And Ryan is one of those people staying motivated and doing the work. I appreciate those characteristics deeply.

Walking gives you time for those conversations without turning them into an interview. Nobody is watching a clock. Nobody is waiting for the server to clear the table. A question about springs can turn into something else entirely twenty minutes later because a tree, a bird, or a flooded piece of trail interrupts you. Friendships can be built that way. Not face-to-face across a table, but side-by-side with muddy shoes.

I had another reason for paying close attention that morning. Whenever I go into the field, I am usually gathering something. Photographs. Observations. Species references. Sometimes I know exactly what I am looking for. Sometimes I come home with something completely unexpected.

Not every hike has to produce a Florida Field Guide piece, and I do not want to turn every trip into an assignment. But this particular morning felt like one I wanted to bookmark somehow. It was an early field outing with Ryan, a new connection, and a return to a park I had known since childhood. I liked the idea that eventually something I saw there might become part of the Field Guide.

I just did not know what.

Hillsborough River State Park is familiar territory for me. I camped there as a kid. I have been back as an adult. But it had been several years since my last visit, and there are places you can know well enough to remember while still having no idea what the woods are going to give you on a particular morning.

Especially somewhere popular. Animals know where the trails are too, so I suspected I was more likely to come home with a plant than some miraculous close encounter with wildlife. That meant staying observant without becoming overly determined. If you go looking too hard for one specific thing, you can miss everything else.

I did come home with photographs of a species that will be makeing its way into the Florida Field Guide. For now, I am going to keep that a secret from the trail. I'll let you know when it drops. wink

But there was another thing I had hoped to find that morning, although it was not a species at all. It was a tree.

There is a sharp turn along the river where the trail follows a point of land high above the water. A large old tree grows there, leaning gradually out over the river until its trunk is almost parallel with the surface below. It has been doing that for as long as I can remember.

I knew that tree when I was a kid. I do not remember the first time I saw it. It has simply occupied space in my head for decades, one of those pieces of landscape that becomes part of your private map of Florida. I wondered whether it would still be there. It was.

Older, obviously. Still leaning. Still alive. Still reaching out over the Hillsborough River exactly where I remembered it.

I would not recommend walking out onto it, although the shape of the trunk practically invites you to try. At some point common sense has to win. But seeing it again felt like running into an old friend who has somehow managed not to change very much.

Florida changes so quickly that sometimes the places we remember disappear before we realize we should have gone back to look at them again. That tree was still there.

A little farther along the trail, I found something I did not remember at all. On the left side of the main path, a fallen tree had come to rest against another, creating this low opening beneath it. Beyond the trunk was a tiny footpath that disappeared out of sight.

My husband and Ryan both walked right past it. I stopped. I ducked underneath the tree and followed the path. On the other side was a small clearing of grass completely enclosed by the woods. It felt ridiculous. Not fake or manicured or dramatic. Just hidden. A little room in the forest that you would never know existed unless something made you look sideways at exactly the right moment.

And immediately my brain went to Alice in Wonderland. Of course it did. It had that same feeling of stepping away from the expected route and finding something slightly improbable on the other side. If a little swamp rabbit in a waistcoat had come tearing through the grass complaining that he was late, I would have accepted it without question. There was probably a gopher hole nearby that could have served as the entrance to Wonderland. A Luna moth caterpillar could have handled the philosophical conversation over a hookah.

I did not need the meadow to mean anything more than that. It was just fun. It was beautiful. And I almost missed it. That is enough.

By late morning we were heading back, wet from the knees down, hot, muddy, and carrying the accumulated scraps of several hours of conversation. We had talked about conservation and springs and water quality. We had stopped for steam coming off cypress bark and bubbles rising through tannic water. I had found photographs that will eventually become artwork. I had checked on a tree I remembered from childhood. I had crawled beneath another one and found a secret little meadow.

And somewhere in between all of that, I got to know Ryan better. That is one of the reasons I like meeting people outside. You can learn plenty about someone over coffee. But walk a few miles with them and you learn what they notice. I think I like that better.

Thank you, Ryan for spending a morning with my husband and I.

Thank you, Live Wildly for giving the space for connections to happen.