Florida Caverns State Park Camping

Florida Caverns State Park is a 1,449.60-acre (586.63 ha) Florida state park on the Chipola River in Jackson County, Florida, about 3 miles (4.8 km) north of Marianna. It is the only state park in Florida that offers guided tours through a dry cave system. During the tour, visitors can see stalactites, stalagmites, columns and flowstone. The park protects more than 30 named caves in the karst landscape of the Marianna Lowlands. The National Park Service designated part of it a National Natural Landmark in 1977, and the Florida Geological Survey named it a State Geological Site in 2000.
The caves formed in limestone laid down in a shallow sea during the Late Eocene, about 38 million years ago, but the passages themselves are much younger. They were dissolved as the Chipola cut its valley deeper and the water table fell, and were later decorated with calcite deposited by seeping rainwater. The river partly disappears underground at the River Sink, and Blue Hole Spring, a second-magnitude spring, feeds a swimming area in the park.
The park's limestone bluffs, hardwood slopes and floodplain support plants otherwise associated with the southern Appalachian Mountains, along with some of Florida's few protected upland glades, a critically imperiled habitat. Its caves shelter the Georgia blind salamander and the Dougherty Plain cave crayfish, and Old Indian Cave was long Florida's main winter roost of the federally endangered gray bat.
People have used the area for at least 5,000 years, and Andrew Jackson's army crossed the Chipola's natural bridge in 1818. The state bought the first land for the park in 1935. The Civilian Conservation Corps then developed the tour cave, roads, trails and a limestone visitor center, and the park officially opened in 1942. Hurricane Michael destroyed most of the park's trees in 2018 and closed the caves for nine months. Besides cave tours, the park offers camping, hiking, horseback riding, paddling on the Chipola and swimming at Blue Hole.

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