Wednesday afternoon I faced my childhood fears and took the family hiking with gators on Gainesville’s La Chua Trail on the North Rim of Florida’s Paynes Prairie State Park. “Chua,” the Timucuan Indian word for sinkhole, is a 3 mile trail from the Alachua Sink out to an observation platform in the prairie. Gators galore, and NOT the orange and blue kind! Yes. It was terrifying.