Hiking Trails on Amelia Island

Call it walking rather than hiking. Amelia Island is a barrier island: there is no elevation, the highest ground is a dune, and almost none of the trail network has shade. What it has instead is marsh, and marsh is worth the trip.

Egans Creek Greenway — the best of it, and free

Egans Creek Greenway is three hundred acres of tidal marsh in the middle of the island, and the trails through it are flat, wide, crushed shell or mown grass, and completely free. The main north–south route runs a couple of miles; side loops add distance. There are several trailheads.

The surface suits pushchairs, hybrid bikes and most mobility scooters in dry weather — that caveat matters, because this is a marsh.

Alligators are resident in the creek and ponds and are frequently visible from the trail. This is not a managed exhibit. The channels come right up to the path in places, so keep well back from the water edges, keep children in hand and keep dogs on a short lead.

No shade at all. Not a stretch of it. In July, averaging 90.7°F with matching humidity, that makes an afternoon walk here a bad idea rather than a warm one.

Fort Clinch — the only real forest loop

Inside Fort Clinch State Park at the northern tip there is a six-mile off-road bicycle trail looping through the maritime hammock, plus shorter walking trails and a boardwalk through the dune. It is the closest thing on the island to woodland walking, and the mile of live-oak avenue on the drive in is worth the entry on its own.

Park entry applies. The state park publishes its own fees and hours and we do not republish figures we have not confirmed.

South, to the Talbot islands

Twenty-five minutes down A1A the barrier islands stop being developed.

Little Talbot Island has several miles of trail through maritime hammock, dune and along the marsh side, behind five miles of undeveloped Atlantic beach. Big Talbot Island has bluff-top trails over Nassau Sound and the boneyard beach — but read the access honestly: the descent to that beach is a steep, sandy, uneven scramble down an eroding bluff, not a boardwalk, and it changes shape year to year.

On the Talbot marsh and forest trails, repellent is equipment rather than a nicety from spring through autumn.

When to go

October to April. It is not a close call.

• November is the driest month of the year at 1.87 inches, averaging a high of 72°F.
• April averages 77.4°F and 3.03 inches.
• May to September brings heat, humidity, a thunderstorm most afternoons and insects that will end a marsh walk early. September is the wettest month at 7.19 inches.

Whenever you go: early morning. That is when the birds are active, the light is good and the heat has not arrived.

What we have not confirmed

Trailhead parking, gate hours at the Greenway, and the route and surface of the Amelia Island Trail — the shared-use path along the island's eastern side. That last one we are deliberately not writing up until someone confirms where it actually runs and what it is paved with.

Related: birding for what is on the marsh, biking for the Fort Clinch loop on two wheels, and conditions for the forecast.