Edward Ball Wakulla Springs State Park is a Florida State Park in Wakulla County, Florida, USA. This 6,000 acre (24 km²) wildlife sanctuary, located south of Tallahassee, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and designated a National Natural Landmark. It has three nature trail systems which lead the visitor through pine forests, Bald Cypress wetlands and hardwood hammock. Hikers, bicyclists and horse riders are welcome. The wildlife found in the forest includes White-tailed deer, Wild Turkey, and many other bird species, while American Alligators, bass, gar, various snakes, and West Indian Manatee (during the winter) populate the springs, swamps, and river.
The park draws its name from Edward Ball, the DuPont family financial manager who sold the park lands to the state of Florida and its contained Wakulla Springs, one of the world's largest and deepest first-order freshwater springs and an exit point of the Floridan Aquifer. Wakulla Springs' highest outflow has been measured at 860,000 US gallons per minute (54 m³/s). The spring's average flow is about 400,000 US gallons per minute (25 m³/s). The opening of the spring is 180 feet (55 m) down, through which cave divers, especially those of the Woodville Karst Plain Project have explored many miles of its underwater tunnels. The spring gives rise to Wakulla River which flows several miles to the south where it empties into the Gulf of Mexico.
Paleo Indians are known to have camped at the spring 12,000 years ago, where they hunted mastodons, bison and other ancient animals. The bottom of the spring bowl is littered with bones of mastodons, giant sloths, giant armadillos and camels. Glass bottom boat tours of the spring and river operate all year.
Sally Ward Spring and Cherokee Sink are located within the Park, while Leon Sinks Geological Area is nearby and part of the same karst system.
Read more about Edward Ball Wakulla Springs State Park: Recreational Activities
Famous quotes containing the words ball, springs, state and/or park:
“I don’t like comparisons with football. Baseball is an entirely different game. You can watch a tight, well-played football game, but it isn’t exciting if half the stadium is empty. The violence on the field must bounce off a lot of people. But you can go to a ball park on a quiet Tuesday afternoon with only a few thousand people in the place and thoroughly enjoy a one-sided game. Baseball has an aesthetic, intellectual appeal found in no other team sport.”
—Bowie Kuhn (b. 1926)
“Out of the slimy mud of words, out of the sleet and hail of verbal imprecisions,
Approximate thoughts and feelings, words that have taken the place of thoughts and feelings,
There springs the perfect order of speech, and the beauty of incantation.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“The essence of the modern state is that the universal be bound up with the complete freedom of its particular members and with private well-being, that thus the interests of family and civil society must concentrate themselves on the state.... It is only when both these moments subsist in their strength that the state can be regarded as articulated and genuinely organized.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The park is filled with night and fog,
The veils are drawn about the world,”
—Sara Teasdale (1884–1933)