Ichetucknee Head Spring

The Ichetucknee River begins at the Ichetucknee Head Spring and runs about six miles through cypress and hardwood forest before joining the Santa Fe River. Along the way it is fed by a chain of other springs, so the whole river is spring water, clear enough to see the eelgrass on the bottom and a steady 72 degrees or so all year. It is one of the best known tubing rivers in the country, and on summer weekends thousands of people float it. The crowds nearly wrecked it. By the 1960s the crowds were trampling riverbanks and scouring the beds of eelgrass, and the park eventually began limiting how many tubers could enter the river each day and where they could launch. The upper river, closest to the head spring, is the most fragile stretch, and since 2021 it has been closed to tubing and open only to paddlers. The state bought the land in 1970 from a phosphate company, and the river was designated a National Natural Landmark in 1972. People lived along the river long before tourism. Archaeologists identified the site of a Spanish mission, San Martín de Timucua, established in the early 1600s among the Timucua people near the river, and the springs have yielded prehistoric tools and the bones of Ice Age animals. The water itself is old. Rain that falls on the uplands to the north and east soaks into the limestone and travels underground for years before it rises in the springs; studies of nearby springs date the water at roughly ten to twenty years old.