Well...Damn.

The New York Times, not satisfied with disclosing national secrets, is now disclosing native Florida secrets.

IT’S a warm late-winter afternoon in northern Florida, and three young women are gingerly descending a half-dozen wooden stairs to a mouthwash-blue pool of translucent water ringed with cypress trees. Yesterday, they paddled the Ichetucknee River, a clear, narrow stream fed almost exclusively by nine major springs. Today, at this popular swimming hole in the town of High Springs, they want full immersion.

Visit the natural freshwater springs of northern Florida, and you may find it impossible to resist plunging in, or at least riding along the surface in a kayak or tube. Typically surrounded by trees and lush vegetation, the springs are often an eerily beautiful blue or green. Some are so clear that kayakers photographed on them appear as if they were floating on air. The purity of the water at Ginnie Spring has attracted the Coca-Cola Company, which has a permit to extract up to 600,000 gallons a day from a deeply placed well there and bottles some of it as Dasani water. And with water temperatures a cool 68 to 72 degrees, these alluring springs are unlikely spots for a nervous Northerner’s meeting up with an alligator, or so their aficionados insist.

At least eight billion gallons of water a day gush up out of the Floridan aquifer, according to the United States Geological Survey, mostly in northern and central Florida, which has one of the largest concentrations of springs in the world. “It is one of the few places where you can actually look down into an aquifer,” said Harley Means, a geologist with the Florida Geological Survey, in the state’s Department of Environmental Protection. The region’s limestone substrate is so permeable, and the water table so close to the surface, that water readily works its way up from the ground. Besides generating rivers, the springs create, in effect, windows and doorways into the aquifer itself.

While long overshadowed by the state’s theme parks and beaches, the springs are well known locally. Floridians use these waters for swimming, diving, snorkeling, canoeing, kayaking and tubing.


So much for Floridians enjoying their springs this year.