A visit to the Disney Wilderness Preserve

About an hour from Disney World, you can find a land that is everything the Disney parks aren’t — pristine, undeveloped, peaceful, solitary.

It’s the Nature Conservancy’s Disney Wilderness Preserve, an 11,500-acre expanse of restored wetlands at the head of the Greater Everglades watershed. You won’t find Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck here — just maybe field mice and wild waterfowl.

The area bears the Disney name because the company preserved the land in the 1990s in order to offset development at Disney World. Disney bought an 8,500-acre ranch slated for residential and commercial development and donated it to the Nature Conservancy along with money for its restoration. The Greater Orlando Aviation Authority added an additional 3,000 acres to mitigate expansion at the airport.

We visited the preserve during a recent “cold” snap here in Florida to walk the 6 miles of trails in hopes of enjoying the clear, crisp day and perhaps spotting some wildlife.

There are three trails you can choose:

• A half-mile path that leads from the welcome center around a nearby pond (and hardly justifies the drive, to be honest)
• A 2.5-mile “Wilderness Trail” that takes you deeper into the preserve, including a short path that leads to a picnic area on the shore of Lake Russell
• A 6-mile trail that combines both of the shorter paths — and then some.

On our visit, we set out to do the full 6-trail on a morning when the temperature wasn’t supposed to get out of the 60s — an important point, because even when the temperature in Florida is cool, the sun can be burning hot.

While there were plenty of pine trees, birds and animals were scarce. We saw a couple of white-tail deer and a few shy birds flitting through the brush, but not much else.

If you’re luckier with your bird-watching than we were, you might spot a bald eagle, red-cockaded woodpecker, wood stork or sandhill crane. We saw a pair of sandhill cranes on a field at a nearby school, but not on the preserve. The area also is home to the Southeastern big-eared bat, Sherman’s fox squirrel, Eastern indigo snake and gopher tortoise. 

It’s an enjoyable walk, but once you get past Lake Russell, shady spots get scarce and the landscape doesn’t change much — although we did find a surprising hidden Mickey along the trail.

If you’re interested in seeing a bit of wild Florida, the preserve is open daily from 9:30 a.m.-4 p.m. For more information, visit the website or call 407-935-0002.