Saddle Creek is one of the largest county parks in central
Florida and has facilities for all the family, whether you just
want to cruise your boat on a beautiful lake, take advantage of
some great fishing, or hike along some wonderful forest trails. In
addition, Saddle Creek Park is part of the Great Florida Birding
Trail. There are also facilities for target shooting, as well
as children's playgrounds, sports facilities and picnic gazebos. If
you love spending time outdoors, you will love Saddle Creek
Park.
Up until the early nineteen sixties Saddle Creek Park was an
open-cast phosphate mine. After that it was given to the local
county authorities to administer and it became a local park
facility. It has taken a large part of the time since then to allow
nature to fully recover the mines to the point that the casual
observer would never think that the park had ever been used for
anything else.
Saddle Creek used to be one of the main water flow channels from
the Green Swamp to the Peace River, however, due to the increased
urbanization over the last few decades this has ceased to be the
case. There are some current plans to rectify this situation and
hopefully they will be successful.
This geocache is a part of the Trek Ten Again
in 2009 program. Participation in that program, while a lot of fun,
is not required to log this cache here. Trek Ten Again in
2009 marks the second year of the Friends of the Parks Foundation’s
call to explore the outdoors in Polk County. Five new nature trails
have been added to the program’s original ten trek locations
throughout Polk County. Each nature trail includes geocaches with a
self-inking stamp like the one you’ll find in this cache for
validating your visits to at least ten of the featured trails. You
can choose which ten trails you visit, and of course you may trek
all 15!
New game cards, which participants stamp and return to be entered
into the year end prize drawings, will be available at libraries,
OUTPOST 27 cache and at the five guided hike events. Validated
game cards must be received by mid October 2009 (date TBA) to be
eligible for prize drawings and a certificate of completion. Trek
Ten Again in 2009 maps and other information about each of the
featured nature trails may be downloaded from the Friends of the
Parks website. Check out our
Profile for more details.
This cache was placed with the assistance
of the
Florida
Geocaching Association