Singletrack/MTB
Gravel/All-road
Dirt-road Touring
Fat-bike
Orange Blossom Gravel & the Disappearing Isle of Florida
Despite only just moving away, Nic Morales couldn’t stay away from his home state of Florida for long. With Orange Blossom Gravel in its second year as an official event, Nic took the opportunity to dissect the state of his home and what events like these add to the unique community there…
PUBLISHED Jan 23, 2025
You can’t see it, but they tell you it’s there. Be it a crowd of onrushing friends or encouraging parents onshore, they tell you, “You’ll feel it. Just go.” Swimming through the murky waters of the Atlantic, even the bravest of us feel a sense of creeping anxiety. The emerald waters beneath obfuscate anything more than a few feet away, and the mind wanders. You have to keep going. You have to believe. Inevitably, with enough effort, you get there. Standing proudly atop an ephemeral archipelago, you see it. You look back at the shore, not from it.
It’s a simple yet dizzying perspective. You’re standing on nothing. A wilful construct of the tides that never lasts more than a day or two, and yet something so profoundly powerful it seems as if it’s been there forever. The chance to look back at the place you’ve come from offers a perspective that isn’t radically different from the shore but distinct enough to let you understand something you would have never seen on solid ground. Your path to the place just above the tides paved almost entirely by will. And belief, of course.
The day wasn’t going to be picturesque. I’d arrived in the miniature town of Avon Park before the sun crested the state’s unending horizon, but I’ve spent enough time in Florida to know when things look great and when they don’t. I’ve always said January is the best time to be a Floridian, but there are exceptions to that rule. Though the rain had largely stopped at the break of dawn, howling winds came in from what seemed like all sides. What’s usually a cyan blue sky sat like a dimly lit sheet. Suspended in mid-air, the texture where the earth met the sky was sodden grey.
I’d never been there, but I’d also been here a thousand times before. Small towns like Avon Park aren’t common anymore, but I spent most of my childhood ambling through places a lot like it. The extractive corner stores and the ominous, arguably nefarious, repurposed white school buses all felt like home. As I walked into the Jacaranda Hotel, visions of a white Christmas assaulted my eyes. Months away from the sweltering heat, it’s something to celebrate. After texting Steve, I headed out back. He eagerly awaited arriving riders, flanked by his wife, Jessica, and a few gallons of coffee.
“Hey, pleasure to meet you in person!” he said.
We’d spoken briefly a few times over the years, rotating through adjacent groups of bike friends, but I’d never met Steve in person. I knew him as a pillar of the vibrant bike community in Tampa, where there were, by my count, four to six large, consistent group rides. Tampa wasn’t a place you went to ride a bike. Heck, statistically speaking, it was a place you should actively avoid. But people like Steve Ayers make places like Hillsborough County livable for those on two wheels. Now, he was exporting that sense of community to the central plains of the peninsula—to his familial roots in Avon Park.
Orange Blossom Gravel is only in its second year, but it felt like a long time coming. The bike community in Florida, at least the non-competitive one, is small. You get to know almost everyone if you spend enough time at group rides and swap meets. All the characters from adventures past were present. Everyone exchanged pleasantries and quietly hoped the dim skies wouldn’t open and start to weep. After all, riding in Florida is hard enough. The last thing we needed was to walk through sloppy, peanut-butter mud. In Florida, events tend to take place in the Winter and early Spring, with most centering around races or challenges of some sort. There are some exceptions, but the scene has lacked a true hangout. An event that might endeavor a challenge for those who seek one but ultimately bases itself around gathering and sharing in a love for bikes. Despite its youth, Orange Blossom Gravel felt like what the community here was missing.
Eventually, riders split into three groups correlating to their intended riding style. On offer were 30, 50, or 90-mile courses, each endeavoring similar but varying kinds of asphalt, clay, gravel, and light forest roads. Before long, a procession of lycra-clad individuals cropped up with hydro packs and aero socks. Set on blazing through the 90-mile course, the racers took to the start line like a prize was at stake. Led by Steve, he counted them down, and they were off. Talking to him before it all began, he’d insisted it wasn’t a competitive event.
“You can ride it however you want! If you want to go fast—great. If not, that’s great too!”
Of course, there were some stragglers. A Rivendell tandem closed out the back of the 90 milers—the most notable of a small contingent of eclectic rigs that stuck out from the gel-ridden peloton just in front. Next was the 50-mile group. A diverse pack of cyclists, including myself, largely trying to take it slow. Chaos ensued about 10 seconds after Steve sent us off when someone had a mechanical and destroyed any semblance of a large, homogenized group. Splitting off from those who stopped to help out and those who didn’t, the crew I glommed onto almost immediately headed just off course. The Maxwell Groves Country Store was apparently on last year’s route, and my friend Luis knew of the treasures that lay in wait. What better way to start a 50-some-mile ride than with freshly made Florida creamsicle?
Stepping inside the store, I was transported back in time. It was creaky, old, and quaint. Inside, a woman and her adolescent daughter ran the entire operation. A picturesque, almost cartoonish orange glow pervaded virtually every corner of the small wooden structure. It was a vision of Florida true to the form many of us have come to understand. Smoked alligator and citrus—what could be more Floridian than that?
While the former was a little more common than my vegetarian sensibilities like to admit, the latter is a point of distinction entering a crossroads in Florida. The state’s iconic citrus groves, much like the ones that beset the riding that day, are rapidly disappearing. Through an orange blight dubbed “citrus greening” and the consistent rapid intensification of almost every storm affecting the state during the late summer and fall, orange groves have become almost entirely unprofitable for Florida farmers. The lands once dominated by these orange groves are continually repurposed for the sprawling suburban development now expanding through most of what once sat as undeveloped “old Florida.” With it comes more development, fewer green spaces, and a greater intensification of the climate issues once mitigated by the state’s natural climate buffers such as wetlands, naturally occurring tree canopy, and mangrove marshes. As we left the Maxwell Groves Country Store and ambled onto the straight, flat clay roads, I was reminded of what endeared me to places like these and why they need more spotlight than ever before.
Plainly put, Florida isn’t a dream cycling destination. There aren’t a plethora of lung-busting climbs, picturesque paths, or harrowing descents. The roads are dangerous, the climate is often as treacherous as the animals, and the technical aspects some cyclists look for in their riding usually come in the form of something that seems unnecessarily difficult. For example, when you get out to Colorado or even the humble hills of my new home in lower Appalachia, there’s an immediate understanding of the ride’s inherent challenge. You climb, crest the top of some peak, and descend. A dynamic equation built into the fun most riders look for. In Florida, the difficulty comes in the form of sugar sand roads, flooded, mucky riding trails, and sheer survival. As someone who has contracted several rare diseases at the wriggling mouths of the ticks, chiggers, and mosquitoes that inhabit this place, I know from experience that the land demands its pound of flesh.
What you get in exchange, however, is a passport. An ability to traverse pine scrub and marsh, flatland and forest, and sand road and sulfur spring within a few hours. Much like the riding Steve had set out for us in Avon Park, the sheer variety of biome I experienced as a resident of the state for 29 years is something to behold. Bikes, more so than any other form of transportation, allow you to see parts of this paradise lost that have long since been forgotten. Vestiges of natural worlds past, once seen as too wild to be conquered, are now all but inevitably waiting to be paved over. A park hopper pass for the masochistic, if you will.
As I engaged in my typical event pacing strategy—one where I leapfrog from group to group, trying to absorb as much as possible—I saw what I once found familiar: 55-mile-per-hour country roads with off-shoots into rooty, sandy, palm frond-laden doubletrack. Seemingly endless thickets of split oak interrupted only by emerald green waters. This was Florida. The land of contrasts. A place where, on any given ride, you could fool yourself into thinking no other human has set foot for hundreds of years, only to be within yelling distance of a Chili’s. Despite the intended humor there, I think that strange combination of odd factors makes Florida unique. The fact that access to nature is second to none. Growing up in Central Florida, I often called the region “the flower.” On a map, large wildlife preserves bursting with life sit in almost every cardinal direction and within 15-20 miles of flatland pedaling—an entirely achievable goal for most endeavoring cyclists. There’s no mountain to traverse or supremely technical singletrack to navigate, just the ever-encroaching development of single-family homes and strip malls.
Talking to Steve about his desire to start the event, he expressed a similar sentiment,
“We’re just gonna keep going until we can’t anymore. It’s probably naive, overly optimistic, and futile, but whatever. We can have a lot of fun in the meantime.” We briefly discussed the dark cloud looming above most Flordians’ heads. Amid a skyrocketing cost of living, a post-COVID population boom, and two of the hottest summers in recorded history, the places we hold dear are rapidly disappearing. Steve continued, “One of my biggest motivating factors with this event, other than to bring this kind of non-competitive good vibes event to Florida, is to show these small towns that there is another way to bring revenue to these places besides just selling off all this land to developers.”
A few days prior, it was announced that Alico—one of the state’s largest Citrus producers—is set to sell off most of its orange groves in favor of housing developments. While some might argue that the population growth the state experienced in the wake of COVID might call for more housing, Florida has very low affordable housing density. In tours past, my friends and I biked through entire dormant towns abandoned after trigger-happy housing developers imagined the market to be better than predicted. The wildlife displaced, and the ecology ruined by cookie-cutter rows of stucco silhouettes. In instances where market predictions were more accurate, Florida has become entirely unrecognizable. A dystopian vision of what living here means for those who never took the time to truly experience it.
Battling an aggressive headwind on our way back to the Jacaranda Hotel, my fourth and final group for that day comprised the kinds of Floridians I’d come to know through bikes. Denizens of the woods who understood the necessary superposition one must occupy to be at peace here. We knew that most of this was likely going to disappear. Flat, now-unharvestable land was a proposition all too valuable not to put a combination Domino’s, Long John Silver’s, smoke shop, and AT&T strip mall. After all, who doesn’t need that? But that doesn’t mean the adopted attitude of current residents is one of nihilistic acceptance. Like Steve, people here are dedicated to fighting for every last inch of these grassy marshes. Even if the bulldozers are only held off for a year or two, even when the rest of the country refers to the state as the nation’s “toilet,” even when 150-mile-per-hour winds throw structures hundreds of yards away—Florida demands belief.
For me, swimming out to a disappearing sandbar is a quintessential Florida experience. My childhood was chock full of days at the beach, hoping, wishing, and thrashing to make it out onto these impossible isles. I didn’t always do it. I didn’t always believe enough. Sometimes, I defeatedly turned back or submitted to an on-rushing wave to get back to safety. But if my time riding a bike in my home state taught me anything, it’s that the belief isn’t in vain. Standing on the impossible, shifting, momentary granules of a sandbar, grassy field, or on the clay roads at Orange Blossom Gravel, even if just for a moment, allows you to see something you might never have without belief.
For more on Orange Blossom Gravel, visit OrangeBlossomGravel.com.
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