Straightforward hanging preform hide on a flat, grassy mile-long loop trail. Kitching Creek Preserve is a new county preserve in Hobe Sound. It contains a restored marsh and pond area in the headwaters of Kitching Creek, a tributary of the Loxahatchee River. Open sunrise to sunset. Watch for birds, gators, turtles, and other wildlife.
This preserve is called "Kitching Creek" but a nearby road is called "Kitchen Creek" - what's the deal? Kitching Creek is the name given to the waterway by local pioneers, named after the Kitching family that had a homestead along the creek. Siblings Broster, Susanna, Pennington, Walter, and Sylvanus Kitching came to Florida in from England in the late 1800s where they were pioneer residents of Sebastian, Jupiter, and Stuart. Sylvanus had a store in Sebastian, Walter ran the popular tradeboat "Merchant" on the Indian River, and Pennington had a store in Jupiter.
By the 1930s, the Kitchings were not longer in Jupiter and people started mistakenly calling it "Kitchen Creek" instead. This name gained popularity in the ensuing decades, even appearing on Coast & Geodetic Survey topographic maps. In 1973, Jonathan Dickinson State Park successfully persuaded the Board Of Geographic Names to recognize "Kitching Creek" as the waterway's official name. Despite this, the nearby road still retains the 'wrong' name and local newspapers still periodically misspell the name.
The adjacent ditch is presumably a canalized portion of the creek dug decades ago to speed up drainage in western Hobe Sound. The lower part of the creek is in Jonathan Dickinson State Park and mostly retains its natural condition.