High Ridge Scrub Natural Area - Nature preserve in Lake Worth Beach - 7300 High Ridge Rd, USA

It's a nice & small natural area! If you just want to walk and have a refreshing ambiance, I recommend going to the place. We're lucky to see a Gopher Turquoise in the area! I had a great experience!

High Ridge Srcub is, in my opinion, one of the nicer of the 32 Palm Beach County narural area parks. It is walking / hiking only ones. It has nice benches and a covered area. We did see a gopher turtle burrow. Parking is very limited, about 5 spots and one handicap space.

My husband found out about this area from the Alltrails app; hadn’t this happened, we wouldn’t have known about it because the park is located in a residential area. The parking is extremely small (just for 5-6 cars), and there are no restroom. You enter the scrub area through a small fence-door, which has to be kept closed at all times to keep the gopher tortoise (a protected species) safe. During the early 1950s, this area was a sand mine, which provided fill for the wet areas in/around Manalapan. Later, it was mined for the underlying orange soil. In the 1990s, residents of the neighborhood asked Palm Beach County to buy High Ridge and turn it into preserve, which happened around 1999-2000. Today this 39-acre-park has two trails, one paved and one unpaved. The longest one is about 1.5mi; therefore, you won’t spend a lot of time to discover this area, unless you stop to take pics or to chill on the few benches around the park. It’s the most diverse park I have seen here until now. In some areas you walk on white sand, where you see a lot of holes made by the tortoises. In other areas you’re walking in a small “hilly” wood mostly made of pine trees, which reminded me of the woods I used to walk when I was younger, in the hill behind my hometown in Italy – except, of course, for the hot and humid weather… There is also a vast area full of cactus! We haven’t see a lot of wildlife except for a couple of tortoises and lots of butterflies, but it’s a very relaxing walk. The only negative part is that this scrub is so close to I-95 that there is constantly a lot of traffic noise; however, this won’t stop us from going back.

Just off Rt 95 this is another one of the great Scrub Natural Areas to explore. The parking lot has parking for about 6 cars with a handicap parking spot. The entrance gate is designed to keep the gopher tortoise inside and protected. As it’s a wildlife natural area, dogs and bikes are not allowed. There is a nice concrete path to walk with many natural paths to explore allowing for a walk of about two miles without backtracking. There are a few park benches along the main path. We didn’t spend enough time to explore all the side paths so it’s on our list of parks to return to. With parking being so limited and not bathrooms it’s a 4 Star park but one well worth visiting.

We love hiking here on weekends. Sand & straw on the trails make running easy. The natural beauty is there to be a part of...just take the time to walk & see.

So much fun walking here. Even if you don't feel like it, please please go on the hiking trail. You WILL see multiple gopher tortoises. It's so cool to be able to get so close to them and see them do tortoise things! I didn't know they lived in burrows until I visited.

Nice pretty trail. The whole trail is actually less than a mile so the distances on the map are incorrect. Trail has pretty significant elevation changes for Florida. Some parts can be a bit noises being next to the highway.

Easy to find short walk, reasonably marked paths.