Tate's Hell WMA Mountain Biking Trails

Legend says that, back in 1875, that Cebe Tate came staggering into Carrabelle out of this enormous swamp along the Gulf Coast after being lost for days, perhaps a week, and only lived long enough to say, “My name is Cebe Tate, and I just came from Hell.” That hasn’t kept hikers, mountain bikers, hunters, anglers, off-road enthusiasts and other curious folks from poking around almost 315 square miles of where the rainfall on the Apalachicola National Forest forms tannic streams and curvaceous creeks and sheet-flow swamps that drain to the Gulf of Mexico.

It also certainly didn’t keep Florida’s big paper companies from trying to tame the swamp, building a network of forest roads in the 1960s and 1970s to plant rows of slash pine among the cypress. When the state of Florida took it off their hands in the mid-1990s, it was to protect the fisheries and oyster beds of Apalachicola Bay from the added phosphorous and nitrogen draining off these tree farms.

Tate's Hell Wildlife Management Area (WMA) extends over more than 187,700 acres in Franklin and Liberty counties near Carrabelle. The wildlife management area is part of the close to 200,000-acre Tate's Hell State Forest. In the 1960s and 1970s, the previous owners developed this area as a commercial forest, digging drainage ditches and building roads that significantly altered the hydrology of the forest. In the early 1990s, the state began purchasing the land to protect Apalachicola Bay. Since then, the Florida Forest Service has control burned most of the pinelands, re-established the native longleaf pine over a major portion of the forest, and worked to restore large areas of grassy savannahs.

In addition to the trails listed here, there are miles and miles of dirt roads ready to be explored. Be sure to check the link below for the latest maps.