The best trail running on Amelia Island. 6+ miles of singletrack through maritime forest and rolling coastal dunes, plus a shaded paved park road and beach access — all inside a state park with a 19th-century fort.
Approximately 5 miles of flat, mowed grass paths through one of Amelia Island’s largest conservation areas. A peaceful escape for recovery runs, easy jogs, and wildlife watching — with herons, egrets, and the occasional gator.
There’s a reason Fort Clinch is the first thing I mention when someone asks where to run on Amelia Island. The Fort Clinch trail system offers 6+ miles of genuine singletrack — rolling, rooted, variable underfoot — inside a 1,400-acre state park on the northern tip of the island. For an ultrarunner based on a flat barrier island, that’s significant. I’ve run this loop more times than I can count. I direct a trail race here — the Florida Roots Trail Series — so I’ve also walked every section with a course-marking kit, stood at every tricky junction, and watched dozens of runners navigate the terrain for the first time. That experience gives me a particular view of what the trail is actually like, not just what the map shows. ...
Amelia Island is a gear puzzle. You’ve got firm-packed sand at low tide, soft sugary sand up near the dunes, rooted singletrack through Fort Clinch, pavement on the parkway, crushed shell paths, and a few stretches of boardwalk — all within a few miles of each other. No single shoe handles all of it well, and I’ve made every mistake in the book trying to simplify. At one point I was running everything in one trail shoe. It worked okay on the Fort Clinch singletrack but felt clunky on the roads and wore down faster than expected from the pavement sections. Then I went the other direction — lightweight road shoe for everything — and spent a week with blisters from sand infiltration and zero grip on the wet roots near the fort. ...
Most visitors to Amelia Island head straight for Fort Clinch when they want trails, and I get it — the singletrack inside the state park is legitimately great. But there’s a trail system right in the middle of Fernandina Beach that I probably run more than anything else, and it rarely has more than a handful of people on it: Egans Creek Greenway. I’ve been running Egans Creek for years. On a normal week it shows up in my schedule at least twice — sometimes as a standalone workout, sometimes as the middle section of a longer route that starts downtown, dips through the greenway, and loops back via the neighborhoods along Citrona Drive. It’s become such a default that I forget not everyone knows it’s there. ...
What makes running on this barrier island special — the routes, the light, the community, and the miles that keep me here.