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| Seems like good advice to me, even without the pictogram. |
In June of 2010, I took a trip to Miami Beach, Florida. It was a place I never really wanted to go and I honestly never really thought I'd go back. I made the trip down there that year because the American Institute of Architects in their infinite wisdom decided to schedule their annual convention there and back then I was in the habit of attending that event every other year and 2010 was my year. And yes, you read that right. Convention. In June. In Miami Beach. Go figure.
Even though I never really wanted to go in the first place, I figured why not? I love to travel and I'm OK traveling every once in a while for work even though it always ends up being way more work than travel. I don't care for beaches, I overheat easily (think insulating layer of blubber here), I don't like clubbing and I was pretty sure I wouldn't like the people hanging out in Miami Beach. But it was a couple of days and it was free. Hence the why not. I'll check a spot off my list, have some Cuban food, see some Art Deco hotels and then never go back. And not just to Miami Beach. To south Florida in general. Why on Earth would I want to go back there?
When I boarded the plane at National Airport that June, I honestly thought it was the last time I'd be headed to Miami, at least of my own free will. But something happened on the flight down there that made me change my mind and I've thought about going back a lot in the last three and a half years because of it. Our flight that day was scheduled to land to the north, despite the fact that we were very definitely flying south all the way. So before we could land, our pilot circled south and west of the airport to turn around before landing. And that's when I looked out the window.
Flying over Florida is fascinating. It looks like somebody rolled out the surface of the Earth to about the thickness of a piece of paper. There may be some trees here and there and a little water showing through the crust but the rest of the land is dead flat. I mean like purely horizontal. Like not a hill or bump anywhere. But when our flight in June that year circled to land, what I saw was the surface of the Earth unlike I have ever seen before. It looked more like a petri dish or something I find in the back of my refrigerator after some food I made has been there a couple of months (it happens...) without seeing the light of day.
The land appeared to be some sort of glistening, greenish-ochre, moist, gelatinous mass, with red, brown or green tufts that I could only assume were plants but which really looked more like mold spores. There were no buildings or roads but every so often the land was punctuated by leftover shaped pools of water or cut by a waterway which appeared as a gash in the land. It honestly looked like the set for the Mordor scenes in the Lord of the Rings movies, only a lot sunnier. It was the Everglades. And I made a promise to myself that I would return one day to south Florida to see it a lot closer than the thousands of feet above the Earth I was that on June morning. Last month, I fulfilled that promise.
The Everglades originally spanned some approximately 120 miles from Lake Okeechobee (the large opening you see on maps of Florida near the bottom part of the state) to the Gulf of Mexico. For lack of a more precise term right now, the territory that makes up the 'glades is actually a moving waterway flowing south at a rate of about a quarter of a mile per day. Man has of course interfered here in an ignorant way and changed what used to be. The effects of that involvement are seen close to Lake Okeechobee, where land that was once part of the Everglades is now filled in for Floridians to live and farm on; corrective measures have been taken to restore water flow but it's likely not quite the same. We might consider ourselves lucky. At one time in the history of our country, there were many people living around the Everglades who would have preferred to just fill them in so we could use them for something different. The effects would likely have been disastrous.
We were saved from ourselves here largely by two people: Ernest Coe and Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Coe was a landscape architect from Connecticut who retired to south Florida and was alarmed at what he saw as unchecked destruction of the fragile Everglades ecosystem. Stoneman was a writer for the Miami Herald who correctly saw the Everglades as a river and not a swamp. Her book, The Everglades: River of Grass, was instrumental in educating the public about the true nature of the future park. As you might expect when conservationists and developers are arguing about valuable land with politicians serving as arbiters, the process took a while but ultimately through Coe's efforts, Everglades National Park was established in 1947 by President Truman. The park preserves approximately 20% of the total area of the Everglades.
The Everglades is unique among the National Parks in the United States. When you think of the National Park System, most people think of scenery, natural wonders that make your spirit soar and your heart fall in love with the planet we live on. Think mountains, canyons, forests, breathtaking views and vistas. Think Ansel Adams, bison roaming around Yellowstone, the alien rock landscape that make up the Badlands in South Dakota or six foot plus high snowdrifts on July 4 halfway up Mount Rainier. The Everglades is none of this. It's mostly water. It was created as a National Park first and foremost to preserve the ecosystem that is home to hundreds of species of birds, mammals, fish and reptiles. There is no other U.S. National Park like it. And there likely never will be.
Visiting the Everglades is difficult. First of all, it's an enormous place. It's the third largest National Park in the continental United States after Yellowstone and Death Valley. In all, it's about twice the size of Rhode Island. OK, so being twice the size of Rhode Island doesn't necessarily make it that big. The real issue with the Everglades that makes it difficult to get around is that almost all of it is water, which pretty much means you need a boat. And I don't have one, nor was I about to rent one.
In 2011, I managed to cover the entire loop road within Yellowstone National Park, which is about 1.5 times the size of the Everglades, in a day, but you can't drive around the Everglades the way you can around Yellowstone. There is pretty much just one road inside the park which runs from the Ernest F. Coe Visitor Center on the eastern edge of the park to the Flamingo Visitor Center at the south edge of the park where mainland Florida meets the Gulf of Mexico. The road is about 40 miles long and you get back out just the way you came in.
There are two other visitor centers in the park, the Gulf Coast and Shark Valley Visitor Centers, but neither is accessible from within the park. Instead, you have to drive out of the park, north along Route 997 then west along Route 41 which defines the northern edge of the park for a while before cutting through the Big Cypress National Preserve and then eventually linking up with the northwest corner of the park. Herein lies the difficulty in covering the Everglades quickly. The only roads to access most of the park are on the perimeter of the park with small roads which enter from the perimeter but don't connect to anything else. There's no other way to get there, unless you are in a boat, and that's not that simple either.
The Everglades encompass an incredibly diverse part of our planet. Within the park, there are six different ecosystems which can be explored, each serving as home to a unique collection of plant and wildlife species. It includes saltwater and freshwater environments, mangrove and cypress wildernesses, pinelands and tropical hardwood hammocks and miles upon miles of sawgrass growing in the slowly moving water. There is so much to see. Planning a trip which devotes a little more than a day of time within the park involved making some decisions about what to see and what not to see. Some things just had to be left on the cutting room floor.
My initial desire to visit the Everglades was stirred by flying far overhead and staring down at the strange landscape. Knowing what I know now, you can actually see different environments within the park from the air which look distinctly different. But seeing something strange from the air and exploring the land are two different things. When it came down to the reality of sightseeing last month, I wanted to see as much different wildlife as possible. And that probably meant exploring different parts of the park. Which meant a lot of driving. And it was so worth it.
I started my journey on day one in the park by entering near the Coe Visitor Center, which serves as the park headquarters, and decided I would stop at a couple of places to see what I could find. I pretty much knew I would get to see a lot of different types of wading birds but my hope was that I would see an alligator. A minimum of one. That's all I needed. I knew I picked the right time of year to visit when the water was the lowest and rainfall was the most scarce so wildlife would congregate around remaining open watering areas. I sincerely hoped I wouldn't be disappointed.
First stop: the Anhinga Trail, an approximately one mile long trail which takes you into a sawgrass marsh, home to alligators, wading birds and the very noisy and demonstrative anhinga bird, which feeds on the fish in the marsh by swimming underwater and nests in the trees nearby. But before setting foot on the trail, we had to do one more thing first: tarp the car. That's right.
When we first drove into the parking area for the trail, we wondered if we had screwed up somehow. Most all the cars in the lot were covered with large blue tarps, strapped to the cars' bodies and wheels with bungee cords. Did I miss something? I didn't recall reading the notice to B.Y.O.T. when I was preparing for my trip. Figuring we had made a mistake and that the tarps were there to protect the cars from bird droppings, we parked away from all tress and hoped for the best.
And then we promptly changed our mind. When we got to the bin of tarps and bungee cords (figures, right?), we read a notification that the turkey vultures that live in the park apparently like to strip the rubber off cars' windshield wipers and sometimes even have a go at the window gaskets. I have no idea why but didn't stop to ask questions. The last thing we needed was a bill from the rental car company for missing rubber on our brand new 2015 car. So we turned our vehicle into a sort of mini Christo sculpture and hoped that was good enough. Yes, the pun was intentional.
When I visited Yellowstone in 2011, I hoped I would see a bison, not really understanding how many of them there are in the park. About five minutes in to the park on that trip, we found a male bison walking down the center of the road. Then we saw a couple more grazing about 20 minutes later. Then one near the cafeteria just hanging out that night. Then whole herds near the road. Finally, on our way out of the park, we were surrounded by a herd who walked around our stopped car inches from where we were sitting. In short, they were everywhere.
My quest to see an alligator in the Everglades pretty much matched my bison seeking trip three years ago, although thankfully, we didn't have our car surrounded by a congregation (seriously, look it up) of alligators at any time in the couple of days we were there. As soon as our feet hit the Anhinga Trail, we spotted an alligator sunning itself on the far bank of the pond behind the visitor center with another one cruising nearby in the water. Then we saw another at the edge of the sawgrass from the raised wooden walkway that forms part of the trail. Then another couple, closer together this time and then a couple more on the near bank, just beyond the very open fence separating the paved portion of the trail from the wildlife.
Before we explored the last portion of the trail, I have to comment on how disconcerting it is to be walking a few feet from a five foot long or so sleeping alligator with only a wooden fence about 18 inches high with no sort of barrier whatsoever between you and it. Don't these things kill people? We actually talked about walking by the alligator when some less athletic people walked by…after all, we don't have to outrun the alligator; we just have to run faster than the slowest human, right? Ultimately, nothing happened and we found out later we are far too big for alligators to target but still…if it had been really hungry? I don't know.
The last part of the Anhinga Trail revealed a mother lode of alligators. It's only maybe a hundred or so feet long and is raised above the landscape around you. Waiting for us at the end were about 12 alligators of various size, all asleep in the mid-day sun of course. Being that close to wildlife that is actually wild was impressive despite the fact they are not the prettiest of creatures. I definitely saw what I came to see. Just like the bison in Yellowstone, the alligators in the Everglades proved to be everywhere.
The Anhinga Trail was a fantastic place to start my Everglades experience. In addition to the boatload of alligators, we got the chance to see cormorants, snowy egrets, great blue herons, green-backed herons, a purple gallinule (walking on top of the lilypads that floated on top of the water) and, of course, some anhingas. I see birds of some sort probably every day of my life but these wading and fishing birds are exciting to see. They are way larger than the types of birds I see near Washington, D.C. and to see them in the wild is fantastic. We really got to see the circle of life by watching anhingas fish and capture their prey and by waiting and watching for a while, we managed to see a tiny green-backed heron sit almost totally still for about five minutes before plucking some sort of insect off the surface of the water.
We ended day one in the Everglades by taking a short five or so mile drive further into the park to check out the Pa-hay-okee Overlook, a quarter mile or so long trail that gets you above the saw grass marsh into the top of trees level. There was nothing much to see at the overlook itself but the drive there got us a good look at three enormous wood storks, one standing right by the side of the road before taking flight, probably in response to us getting a bit too close to snap a pic. Day one was definitely a success.
The first day got us a good look at the sawgrass marshes in the park and all our time was spent in the car or on foot. Since you can't really experience the Everglades without getting onto the water, day two was boat focused. To get to a boat, we decided to drive across the state to the town of Everglades City, where the Gulf Coast Visitor Center is located, and take a tour both in the freshwater mangroves and set sail (or motor in this case) on the more open brackish water around the Ten Thousand Islands. Each got us a look at a different ecosystem and some more wildlife.
If you are planning a trip out to the western edge of the Everglades, I'd definitely recommend a boat ride or two. We took two: one into a mangrove wilderness and one out away from the main park into the Ten Thousand Islands. For me, the mangrove boat tour was way more valuable than the Ten Thousand Islands tour but that might have had a lot to do with who was on each boat with us.
The Ten Thousand Islands are a series of mangrove growths which dot the west coast of the park between the freshwater river and the Gulf of Mexico. The water is wide open in parts and you generally don't find alligators here, which I regarded as the ultimate find before my second day looking for wildlife. We managed to see a small pod of dolphins, a magnificent frigate bird from a great distance and a massive group of white pelicans, but that was about as exciting as it got. The boat that takes you into the islands is pretty sizable and our tour probably had 30 or so people on it. Boats like that are perfect for seeing large groups of wildlife from afar but don't offer the ability to get close to what you see or customized tours based on local daily conditions. I'm sure if we had seen more, I would be a lot more enthusiastic about this ride. Don't let my words deter you if you are down there.
The mangrove tour, on the other hand, was fantastic. It's a six person (seven with the pilot) flat-bottomed boat that takes you deep into thick mangrove stands and by islands made entirely of oyster shells. The water here is extremely shallow, especially at low tide when we were lucky enough to go, which meant that we needed to take some parts of the journey at a high speed so the boat would hydroplane on top of the water and not risk getting stuck in the mud. I endorsed this idea. The last thing I want to do is get stuck in a tiny boat waiting for the tide to rise.
Low water means food on the bottom of the channels, sandbars and rivers is within close reach so there were plentiful herons, egrets and especially ibis walking around carefully in search of food and dipping their bills into the water for a meal. Pelicans fished the deeper parts of the water by dive bombing fish to stun them, then scooping them up in their beak pouches for either immediate consumption or a snack later on in the day. Generally speaking we were able to get pretty close to these birds, they seemed largely unfazed by our small boat, especially when our pilot cut the engine.
After a half hour or so looking for wading birds and alligators (unfortunately we saw just one on the trip) we headed into the mangroves. Wildlife-wise, we saw absolutely nothing in the mangroves except a family of raccoons searching for food. As unbelievable as it sounds considering we have raccoons in Virginia, watching an adult and three baby raccoons gathering food was actually amazing. They seemed to be so disciplined and methodical about it and the mother was clearly keeping watch over all three young 'uns.
Getting into the mangroves really got us a look at another side of the park which was totally different from everywhere else we went. When the canopy of trees completely closes overhead, the park becomes a little sinister and scary. I could imagine being in these things at sunset or night cruising through the swamp totally lost evading alligators and snakes and other things that might do me harm. Our pilot, Josh, told us stories about drug smugglers using the Everglades as an entry point to bring contraband into the country. I could totally see that as our tiny boat wended it's way through the vegetation.
I'd be remiss if I didn't give a lot of credit to Josh as a big reason why our mangrove tour was the best thing I did in the Everglades despite the almost complete lack of alligator sightings on that trip. This guy knew his stuff, despite telling us over and over he was not a park ranger or any sort of credentialed wildlife expert. We found a ton of birds both inside the park and in the bay (up-close osprey sightings are really special) and he offered valuable insight as to where to stop to see additional wildlife on our drive back to our hotel in Miami, including where to see manatees.
I firmly believe if we hadn't have taken the mangrove tour with Josh, we would have missed out on manatees on our trip. We spent a good portion of our tour talking about where to find them and how to spot them, including several minutes just sitting floating with the engine off to no avail. The silence in the park with the outboard killed is just stunning by the way. But having spotted nothing resembling a manatee, and with time running short on our tour time, we had to head back to the dock.
Our mangrove tour was supposed to last an hour and 45 minutes. We were already pushing that time when we got into the bay when Josh spotted a mud cloud below the water, which is a signature footprint of a manatee. Manatees feed on the plants on the bottom of the water and leave behind plumes of mud in the water when they pull their food from the channel floor. Despite the time pressure, we stopped. And waited for more mud plumes or for a nose to poke out of the water and exhale / inhale.
After a couple of minutes, we heard a noise and got a glimpse of our first manatee, even if it was no more than a bump where its nose broke the surface. A couple of minutes later there was another. Then another. Maybe a mother and calf feeding. It wasn't much, but it was exciting, especially when a couple of dolphins joined the hunt with us. We had to head back, so we did, arriving about a minute before 11 when Josh's next tour was supposed to leave. Along the way back to the dock, he told us to stop at the Big Cypress National Park Visitor Center in Ochopee and look in the water.
Ochopee is maybe a 25 minute drive from the Everglades Gulf Coast Visitor Center. There's a visitor center there by the side of the road with a small parking lot out front. Walk through the visitor center, past the almost alarming life size fake alligator, and there's a wooden walkway beyond which, through vegetation next to the walk, looks over a freshwater canal which holds fish, alligators and, when we were there, four of five manatees.
Wait for a ripple in the water and watch, eventually they will show themselves. While you can't see much from the walkway, it's high enough and the water is calm enough (like absolutely still) for you to see the entire length of the animals. These things are huge but it's well worth stopping. The walkway is short, maybe about the size of a football field without the end zones, but we spent about 30 minutes there watching the few manatees that were in the canal that day. This is an animal you rarely get to see anywhere, unless you live on the gulf coast of Florida I guess. Treasure the opportunity.
The boat tours we took on day two of our Everglades trip were run by the Everglades National Park Boat Tours, Inc. They are not cheap; it will set you back about $75 for both. But I wouldn't have had the same visit without them. You just can't see the Everglades from the land only. I'm sure I just scratched the surface of what this park offers, even with our last couple of stops at the H.P. Williams Roadside Park and Big Cypress National Reserve Visitor Center (the main one, not the one in Ochopee), which both offered another pile of alligators and birds for us to look at. I'd love to go back sometime, maybe in a few years when I've finished this blog. It would definitely be worth a second trip.
Even though I never really wanted to go in the first place, I figured why not? I love to travel and I'm OK traveling every once in a while for work even though it always ends up being way more work than travel. I don't care for beaches, I overheat easily (think insulating layer of blubber here), I don't like clubbing and I was pretty sure I wouldn't like the people hanging out in Miami Beach. But it was a couple of days and it was free. Hence the why not. I'll check a spot off my list, have some Cuban food, see some Art Deco hotels and then never go back. And not just to Miami Beach. To south Florida in general. Why on Earth would I want to go back there?
When I boarded the plane at National Airport that June, I honestly thought it was the last time I'd be headed to Miami, at least of my own free will. But something happened on the flight down there that made me change my mind and I've thought about going back a lot in the last three and a half years because of it. Our flight that day was scheduled to land to the north, despite the fact that we were very definitely flying south all the way. So before we could land, our pilot circled south and west of the airport to turn around before landing. And that's when I looked out the window.
Flying over Florida is fascinating. It looks like somebody rolled out the surface of the Earth to about the thickness of a piece of paper. There may be some trees here and there and a little water showing through the crust but the rest of the land is dead flat. I mean like purely horizontal. Like not a hill or bump anywhere. But when our flight in June that year circled to land, what I saw was the surface of the Earth unlike I have ever seen before. It looked more like a petri dish or something I find in the back of my refrigerator after some food I made has been there a couple of months (it happens...) without seeing the light of day.
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| Florida from the air, December 2014. |
The Everglades originally spanned some approximately 120 miles from Lake Okeechobee (the large opening you see on maps of Florida near the bottom part of the state) to the Gulf of Mexico. For lack of a more precise term right now, the territory that makes up the 'glades is actually a moving waterway flowing south at a rate of about a quarter of a mile per day. Man has of course interfered here in an ignorant way and changed what used to be. The effects of that involvement are seen close to Lake Okeechobee, where land that was once part of the Everglades is now filled in for Floridians to live and farm on; corrective measures have been taken to restore water flow but it's likely not quite the same. We might consider ourselves lucky. At one time in the history of our country, there were many people living around the Everglades who would have preferred to just fill them in so we could use them for something different. The effects would likely have been disastrous.
We were saved from ourselves here largely by two people: Ernest Coe and Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Coe was a landscape architect from Connecticut who retired to south Florida and was alarmed at what he saw as unchecked destruction of the fragile Everglades ecosystem. Stoneman was a writer for the Miami Herald who correctly saw the Everglades as a river and not a swamp. Her book, The Everglades: River of Grass, was instrumental in educating the public about the true nature of the future park. As you might expect when conservationists and developers are arguing about valuable land with politicians serving as arbiters, the process took a while but ultimately through Coe's efforts, Everglades National Park was established in 1947 by President Truman. The park preserves approximately 20% of the total area of the Everglades.
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| Sawgrass marsh. |
Visiting the Everglades is difficult. First of all, it's an enormous place. It's the third largest National Park in the continental United States after Yellowstone and Death Valley. In all, it's about twice the size of Rhode Island. OK, so being twice the size of Rhode Island doesn't necessarily make it that big. The real issue with the Everglades that makes it difficult to get around is that almost all of it is water, which pretty much means you need a boat. And I don't have one, nor was I about to rent one.
In 2011, I managed to cover the entire loop road within Yellowstone National Park, which is about 1.5 times the size of the Everglades, in a day, but you can't drive around the Everglades the way you can around Yellowstone. There is pretty much just one road inside the park which runs from the Ernest F. Coe Visitor Center on the eastern edge of the park to the Flamingo Visitor Center at the south edge of the park where mainland Florida meets the Gulf of Mexico. The road is about 40 miles long and you get back out just the way you came in.
There are two other visitor centers in the park, the Gulf Coast and Shark Valley Visitor Centers, but neither is accessible from within the park. Instead, you have to drive out of the park, north along Route 997 then west along Route 41 which defines the northern edge of the park for a while before cutting through the Big Cypress National Preserve and then eventually linking up with the northwest corner of the park. Herein lies the difficulty in covering the Everglades quickly. The only roads to access most of the park are on the perimeter of the park with small roads which enter from the perimeter but don't connect to anything else. There's no other way to get there, unless you are in a boat, and that's not that simple either.
The Everglades encompass an incredibly diverse part of our planet. Within the park, there are six different ecosystems which can be explored, each serving as home to a unique collection of plant and wildlife species. It includes saltwater and freshwater environments, mangrove and cypress wildernesses, pinelands and tropical hardwood hammocks and miles upon miles of sawgrass growing in the slowly moving water. There is so much to see. Planning a trip which devotes a little more than a day of time within the park involved making some decisions about what to see and what not to see. Some things just had to be left on the cutting room floor.
My initial desire to visit the Everglades was stirred by flying far overhead and staring down at the strange landscape. Knowing what I know now, you can actually see different environments within the park from the air which look distinctly different. But seeing something strange from the air and exploring the land are two different things. When it came down to the reality of sightseeing last month, I wanted to see as much different wildlife as possible. And that probably meant exploring different parts of the park. Which meant a lot of driving. And it was so worth it.
I started my journey on day one in the park by entering near the Coe Visitor Center, which serves as the park headquarters, and decided I would stop at a couple of places to see what I could find. I pretty much knew I would get to see a lot of different types of wading birds but my hope was that I would see an alligator. A minimum of one. That's all I needed. I knew I picked the right time of year to visit when the water was the lowest and rainfall was the most scarce so wildlife would congregate around remaining open watering areas. I sincerely hoped I wouldn't be disappointed.
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| An anhinga, showing off. |
When we first drove into the parking area for the trail, we wondered if we had screwed up somehow. Most all the cars in the lot were covered with large blue tarps, strapped to the cars' bodies and wheels with bungee cords. Did I miss something? I didn't recall reading the notice to B.Y.O.T. when I was preparing for my trip. Figuring we had made a mistake and that the tarps were there to protect the cars from bird droppings, we parked away from all tress and hoped for the best.
And then we promptly changed our mind. When we got to the bin of tarps and bungee cords (figures, right?), we read a notification that the turkey vultures that live in the park apparently like to strip the rubber off cars' windshield wipers and sometimes even have a go at the window gaskets. I have no idea why but didn't stop to ask questions. The last thing we needed was a bill from the rental car company for missing rubber on our brand new 2015 car. So we turned our vehicle into a sort of mini Christo sculpture and hoped that was good enough. Yes, the pun was intentional.
When I visited Yellowstone in 2011, I hoped I would see a bison, not really understanding how many of them there are in the park. About five minutes in to the park on that trip, we found a male bison walking down the center of the road. Then we saw a couple more grazing about 20 minutes later. Then one near the cafeteria just hanging out that night. Then whole herds near the road. Finally, on our way out of the park, we were surrounded by a herd who walked around our stopped car inches from where we were sitting. In short, they were everywhere.
My quest to see an alligator in the Everglades pretty much matched my bison seeking trip three years ago, although thankfully, we didn't have our car surrounded by a congregation (seriously, look it up) of alligators at any time in the couple of days we were there. As soon as our feet hit the Anhinga Trail, we spotted an alligator sunning itself on the far bank of the pond behind the visitor center with another one cruising nearby in the water. Then we saw another at the edge of the sawgrass from the raised wooden walkway that forms part of the trail. Then another couple, closer together this time and then a couple more on the near bank, just beyond the very open fence separating the paved portion of the trail from the wildlife.
Before we explored the last portion of the trail, I have to comment on how disconcerting it is to be walking a few feet from a five foot long or so sleeping alligator with only a wooden fence about 18 inches high with no sort of barrier whatsoever between you and it. Don't these things kill people? We actually talked about walking by the alligator when some less athletic people walked by…after all, we don't have to outrun the alligator; we just have to run faster than the slowest human, right? Ultimately, nothing happened and we found out later we are far too big for alligators to target but still…if it had been really hungry? I don't know.
The last part of the Anhinga Trail revealed a mother lode of alligators. It's only maybe a hundred or so feet long and is raised above the landscape around you. Waiting for us at the end were about 12 alligators of various size, all asleep in the mid-day sun of course. Being that close to wildlife that is actually wild was impressive despite the fact they are not the prettiest of creatures. I definitely saw what I came to see. Just like the bison in Yellowstone, the alligators in the Everglades proved to be everywhere.
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| Alligators right below our feet. |
We ended day one in the Everglades by taking a short five or so mile drive further into the park to check out the Pa-hay-okee Overlook, a quarter mile or so long trail that gets you above the saw grass marsh into the top of trees level. There was nothing much to see at the overlook itself but the drive there got us a good look at three enormous wood storks, one standing right by the side of the road before taking flight, probably in response to us getting a bit too close to snap a pic. Day one was definitely a success.
The first day got us a good look at the sawgrass marshes in the park and all our time was spent in the car or on foot. Since you can't really experience the Everglades without getting onto the water, day two was boat focused. To get to a boat, we decided to drive across the state to the town of Everglades City, where the Gulf Coast Visitor Center is located, and take a tour both in the freshwater mangroves and set sail (or motor in this case) on the more open brackish water around the Ten Thousand Islands. Each got us a look at a different ecosystem and some more wildlife.
If you are planning a trip out to the western edge of the Everglades, I'd definitely recommend a boat ride or two. We took two: one into a mangrove wilderness and one out away from the main park into the Ten Thousand Islands. For me, the mangrove boat tour was way more valuable than the Ten Thousand Islands tour but that might have had a lot to do with who was on each boat with us.
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| One of the Ten Thousand Islands, with hundreds of white pelicans on the sandbar closest to the boat. |
The mangrove tour, on the other hand, was fantastic. It's a six person (seven with the pilot) flat-bottomed boat that takes you deep into thick mangrove stands and by islands made entirely of oyster shells. The water here is extremely shallow, especially at low tide when we were lucky enough to go, which meant that we needed to take some parts of the journey at a high speed so the boat would hydroplane on top of the water and not risk getting stuck in the mud. I endorsed this idea. The last thing I want to do is get stuck in a tiny boat waiting for the tide to rise.
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| Wading birds looking for food, ready to split if our boat gets too close. |
After a half hour or so looking for wading birds and alligators (unfortunately we saw just one on the trip) we headed into the mangroves. Wildlife-wise, we saw absolutely nothing in the mangroves except a family of raccoons searching for food. As unbelievable as it sounds considering we have raccoons in Virginia, watching an adult and three baby raccoons gathering food was actually amazing. They seemed to be so disciplined and methodical about it and the mother was clearly keeping watch over all three young 'uns.
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| In the mangroves. |
I'd be remiss if I didn't give a lot of credit to Josh as a big reason why our mangrove tour was the best thing I did in the Everglades despite the almost complete lack of alligator sightings on that trip. This guy knew his stuff, despite telling us over and over he was not a park ranger or any sort of credentialed wildlife expert. We found a ton of birds both inside the park and in the bay (up-close osprey sightings are really special) and he offered valuable insight as to where to stop to see additional wildlife on our drive back to our hotel in Miami, including where to see manatees.
I firmly believe if we hadn't have taken the mangrove tour with Josh, we would have missed out on manatees on our trip. We spent a good portion of our tour talking about where to find them and how to spot them, including several minutes just sitting floating with the engine off to no avail. The silence in the park with the outboard killed is just stunning by the way. But having spotted nothing resembling a manatee, and with time running short on our tour time, we had to head back to the dock.
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| Manatee? Maybe. |
After a couple of minutes, we heard a noise and got a glimpse of our first manatee, even if it was no more than a bump where its nose broke the surface. A couple of minutes later there was another. Then another. Maybe a mother and calf feeding. It wasn't much, but it was exciting, especially when a couple of dolphins joined the hunt with us. We had to head back, so we did, arriving about a minute before 11 when Josh's next tour was supposed to leave. Along the way back to the dock, he told us to stop at the Big Cypress National Park Visitor Center in Ochopee and look in the water.
Ochopee is maybe a 25 minute drive from the Everglades Gulf Coast Visitor Center. There's a visitor center there by the side of the road with a small parking lot out front. Walk through the visitor center, past the almost alarming life size fake alligator, and there's a wooden walkway beyond which, through vegetation next to the walk, looks over a freshwater canal which holds fish, alligators and, when we were there, four of five manatees.
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| Manatee? Definitely! It's the pale horizontal shape in the center of the ripple. |
The boat tours we took on day two of our Everglades trip were run by the Everglades National Park Boat Tours, Inc. They are not cheap; it will set you back about $75 for both. But I wouldn't have had the same visit without them. You just can't see the Everglades from the land only. I'm sure I just scratched the surface of what this park offers, even with our last couple of stops at the H.P. Williams Roadside Park and Big Cypress National Reserve Visitor Center (the main one, not the one in Ochopee), which both offered another pile of alligators and birds for us to look at. I'd love to go back sometime, maybe in a few years when I've finished this blog. It would definitely be worth a second trip.
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| Osprey nest. Ospreys return to the same nest every year and expand each year. |
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