Very nice walking/biking trail and areas for kids to play and families to picnic. Canoe rentals available.
I grew up a couple miles from this park, and have walked this parks trails up and down many times. This is a great chance to see a beautiful and really historic part of Hillsborough county. There are several great trails, and a very old wooden boardwalk great for a bike ride. I have canoed the Alafia River several times from here and it is great. The water is a dark brown murky color, and I heard that is from a phosphate mine spill 50+ years ago. Usually the most alligator traffic you will see is limited to eyes poking up hoping you tip over. :-) Great place for picnic.
This is a beautiful park, with miles of paved walking paths as well as unpaved detours/routes you can take to get a little further out into the woods. The trails are extremely well marked, clean restrooms, elevated wooden paths over streams, and extremely well maintained. Get out and get some exercise while enjoying the great outdoors in Southwest Florida.
Great place with many fun activities. We usually do the walking trails both on & off road! But the picnic area is a great place for bdays, picnics or get togethers. They have a canoe launch as well.
There are wooden walkways, exercise bars, picnic tables, some covered, play equipment, bathrooms and easy parking. A beautiful place under trees with squirrels to enjoy.
This park has the best river to canoe down because of how much woods their are and there are great hiking trails for all ages.
Our family has a get-together at this park each year. Plenty of picnic shelters and parking available. There's a playground for the kids and the nature trails are very nice.
Full disclosure: I didn't visit this park in 2013 -- Trip Advisor required that I select a month/year I visited the park to be able to submit this review, dang it. I spent too long writing this review to have to back out because their month/year option doesn't go back to 2007. On with the review:Besides not being able to visit this park any more, my other regret is that I didn't discover it sooner. I used the paved walking trail for exercise starting in October 2006. By about June of 2007, I'd lost about 50 pounds. I'd walk the paved trail once, take the boardwalk twice, walk the paved trail again and go two more times around the boardwalk. An iPod full of music made it easy. I loved that a lot of the trail was lined with shade-providing trees since it was so warm most of the year. The orange blossoms on the boardwalk smelled wonderful -- there were more citrus blossoms on the perimeter of the picnic area with the grapefruits growing out front. With some research, I learned the names of the more mysterious plants and flowers growing throughout the park (buttonbush, hog plum, blue curls, wild potato vine (with its white trumpets with burgundy centers) and even the evil invasive air potato with it's deceptively beautiful heart shaped leaves. Why is it the prettiest plants are always the invasive ones?? Thankfully, I took a lot of pictures to help me remember this pretty place. The Alafia rose pretty high in the summer (I believe) of 2007. I remember how anxious I was to get back to my walk during those days that water covered parts of the trail! Then there was the Thanksgiving Day I went there for my usual walk, thinking it would be very quiet there. I couldn't have been more wrong! It looked like a 4th of July picnic on that day! The parking lot was full and EVERY picnic table was taken!! I was really worried I wouldn't find as nice a place to walk when I moved to Virginia, but the Dismal Swamp Canal Trail has put those worries to rest. On my next trip back to Florida, I will definitely be making a trip to my former stomping grounds that I miss so much.
We popped in to Aldermans in order to check out the Alafia river access at the park's canoe launch area. This section of the park was completely deserted and looked as if it had been neglected, maintenance wise, for a little while. The grassy areas had not seen a mower in a while and there was trash and "stuff" just laying about. A little walk down to the launch area for canoes revealed a stagnant shallow muddy quagmire, again with trash present-despite the multitude of signs telling folks not to litter.I was surprised at the water level as there had been quite a bit of rain for the past month. In my opinion, it would have been a bit of a challenge to navigate away from the launch docks and through the downed trees and branches in the river. Hopefully this was just an off-day for this park. I will try there again later in the year...
Really nice place. Cost 2 dollars for a car load of people. You can rent canoes at another park before you get to the boat ramp. The restrooms are very nice. Nice place to relax and get a workout. The currant wasn't very strong, but when you have to paddle back to car. It was a little harder.