I had last been in the Everglades 50 years ago. My recall was largely limited to a ranger led “swamp tromp” that I took with a collection of non-familial adults when I was a teen, and I was eager to return with a more nuanced eye to its ecology. We were looking for an escape from our anticipated Ohio River Valley winter and had selected Key West, with a short trip to the Everglades, as our destination.
A common phrase used to describe the Everglades in my youth was “River of Grass”. It was borrowed from the highly acclaimed, 1947, non-fiction book, Everglades: River of Grass, by Marjory Stoneman Douglas, which helped bring protection of the Everglades to public awareness. Congress recognized her contributions to the Everglades’ preservation by establishing the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Wilderness within the Everglades in 1997, a preserve within the park. The wilderness designation covers eighty-five percent of the acreage within the national park and provides the strictest environmental protection for the habitat, more so than the national park label itself. The 15 percent that is non-wilderness is what was set aside for visitor accommodations, campgrounds, visitor centers, and a Nike Missile Site. Because of this wilderness designation, the Everglades is not at the impulsive whim of political leadership.
For ease of geography, the Everglades can be broken down into three areas that correspond to the three public entries; The Gulf Coast district to the northwest, the Shark Valley district to the northeast, and the Homestead district to the south. The Gulf Coast district is largely a coastal mangrove estuary best experienced by water-based exploration, such as kayaking or boat tours. The only hiking trail in the district is the 1.5 mile Sandfly Island Trail, which can only be accessed by boat. The Shark Valley section is primarily made up of the Shark River Slough, pronounced “slew”. The slough is the “river of grass”, a 30 miles wide, 100 miles long, seasonal, shallow river that carries wet season overflow from Lake Okeechobee, which is to the north and lies outside the park itself. This area is one of fresh water habitats. Its best known for the Shark Valley Tram Road, a 15 mile loop designed for hiking, biking, and tram tours that offers great wildlife viewing. The Homestead section is a blend of the two, with the saltwater of Florida Bay, the fresh water of the the “river of grass”, and large areas of brackish water where the two meet. The Homestead section offers both hiking and water focused activities.
One surprising thing is that for the most part, despite its massive size, there is a very limited mileage of trails in the Everglades. In the Homestead district for example, which covers nearly half of the park, there are only 21 miles of trails, including the 7.5 mile, out and back, Coastal Prairie Trail that is currently not being maintained. An uncommon habitat, which includes a rare plant, was found along the trail and the park has ceased maintenance while they work up a long term solution for protection. There are 14 named trails, 8 of which are a mile or less in length, and 4 are between 1 and 2 miles in length. The fact of the matter is that there is really just not that much dry land, especially in the wet season, which runs from May through November, roughly corresponding with the hurricane season.
But the real question is how to write a short photo essay about a 1.5 million acre national park. The answer is you can’t. For that reason I will breakdown our experience into this overview article and then write separate articles about the different trails and habitats. Our series of essays will outline our experience in the Homestead district which includes the Royal Palm and Flamingo areas. Interestingly, this is the same section that I visited with my family in an RV in 1976. Our lodge accommodations for this trip, pictured below, were about 1 mile from the campground where my family stayed. The Flamingo Lodge is a campus of 5 buildings, four with 6 condo-like suites, and one office and restaurant building. The units had small kitchens that were perfect for breakfasts and for packing picnic lunches. The lodge campus buildings were built between 2018 and 2023, replacing buildings that were destroyed by hurricanes Katrina and Wilma in 2005. Built out of shipping containers, they were designed to withstand hurricanes and are elevated 13 feet above the ground to protect them from storm surge.
The front of one of the four lodge guest buildings.
The back of a guest building that overlooks the Guy Bradley Trail and Florida Bay.
The office and restaurant building.
As we planned our stay, our thought was to schedule activities that would allow us to experience the five general habitats of the Homestead District: the Sea of Grass, the tree hammock, the watering hole, the mangrove forest, and Florida Bay.
With so much of the park being underwater, we thought to fully experience the Everglades, part of our time would need to be spent on the water. The three options appeared to be airboats, kayak rentals, or use of boat tours affiliated with the park. We opted for the formal boat tours, believing that they would allow us to see a larger segment of the park and that the naturalist guide would help us understand the Everglades better. The timing of the reservations for our boat tours determined our other activities. Our outing schedule panned out as follows:
Day One
Back Country Boat Tour – this would allow us to see the mangrove forest and the brackish water habitat.
Picnic lunch at West Lake Picnic Pavilion, which overlooked a shallow section of West Lake and the associated mangrove forest. There are 3 other picnic areas within the district.
Mahogany Hammock Trail – a boardwalk through a hammock that is home to some massive mahogany trees
Anhinga Trail – featured a large watering hole and is the most popular trail in the park. Wildlife congregates here, especially in the dry season.
Day Two
Gumbo Limbo Trail – a forest of tropical plants in another tree hammock, with an abundance of Gumbo Limbo trees and Royal Palms, and on this day, second graders.
Pa-hay-okee Trail – a boardwalk that overlooks the Shark River Slough “sea of grass”. This trail had been closed for almost a year for renovation and re-opened just before we arrived.
Picnic lunch at West Lake Picnic Pavilion – its central location made it convenient on our outings.
West Lake Trail – a short boardwalk through a mangrove forest.
Florida Bay Boat Tour – a cruise around the numerous mangrove islands that are bird sanctuaries, allowing us to see an amazing number of bird species in a short time.
Over the next couple of months we will publish articles on the experiences these outings provided, giving the reader more complete descriptions of the trails and habitats. For the rest of this essay, we will comment on some of our observations that we noted as we traveled from venue to venue, and stopped to enjoy vistas and notable findings. The reality of getting around the Everglades is it takes time, as things are spread out, but along the way there are many things to observe.
On the day of our arrival we entered through the Homestead Gate in the dark at about 6:30 pm. The gate was unmanned. There was a new moon, meaning there was no moonlight and no streetlights. It was pitch black. We passed perhaps 10 cars coming the other direction on our 38 mile drive to Flamingo Lodge. It was a great introduction to the remoteness of the park.
Our first full day started with the Backcountry Boat Tour, but we got there via a walk on the Guy Bradley Trail and had our first exposure to Everglades wildlife. The trail is short and connects the Flamingo campground with the lodge and the Guy Bradley Visitor center, which is adjacent to the marina. It is named for Guy Bradley, a game warden that was shot in 1905 trying to defend wading birds from illegal poaching for their feathers. He was a victim of the hat fashion of the times.
The ornate feathers of mating season of Snowy Egrets and Great Egrets were the most lucrative, but Roseate Spoonbills, herons, and ibises were also sought after. The poachers could make $1,800 on a single visit to a rookery, the equivalent of $50,000 today. Entire rookeries would be wiped out by the poachers.
Episodic openings in the trailside plant life would allow us to step down to the shore of Florida Bay.
Great Egret – they were almost hunted to extinction in pursuit of 19th century hat fashion.
Spotted Sandpiper – these occur across North America. The female takes the lead in the relationship and may mate with up to four males in a season. The males then tend the nest and raise the young.
The beautiful structure of this contorted Black Mangrove was my introduction to the Everglades’ trees.
That was followed by seeing this Strangler Fig entwining a Cabbage Palm tree. If you look closely in the second photo, you can see the trunk of the palm through the opening in the enveloping roots of the fig tree. The lifecycle is such that a fig seed is defecated by a bird into the nooks of an established tree. The seed germinates and enters an epiphyte stage, where it gets water and nutrients out of the air, while sending thread-like roots down to the ground. Once its roots are established, it grows quickly to “strangle” and outcompete the support tree. We would see this demonstrated on several of our hikes.
While I didn’t see any Red Mangrove in the immediate vicinity, the bay shore was littered with their seeds pods, demonstrating that the buoyant pods are an efficient means of seed distribution.
Perhaps the most interesting thing that we saw on the shore of Florida Bay was this Osprey, perched just a few feet above our heads, feeding on a fish.
The last botanical item of note on the morning walk was the Gray Nickerbean, a tropical vine-like shrub with a threatening seed pod. Being unfamiliar with much of the plant life, I made a point to limit my tactile experience. The seeds inside the pods are gray and were used by Native Americans for jewelry, musical instruments, and medicinal purposes. It is the host plant for the larvae of the Miami Blue butterfly.
The trail ends at the Guy Bradley Visitor Center, an excellent resource for information on the Everglades, where several rangers were on hand to answer questions and make recommendations.
There are displays on the native peoples, history, and wildlife of the Everglades region,
and the all important Mosquito meter, not such a pressing topic in late January.
Outside the center is an excellent spot for bird watching on the mudflats of Florida Bay.
After the boat tour we headed out for our picnic lunch and to experience a couple of the trails.
The West Lake Trail, located at the West Lake Picnic Area, is a small trail that does not appear on the park map, but we found it worthy of a short visit. It is a raised boardwalk through a mangrove forest out to an overlook on West Lake, which is actually more of a inlet off Florida Bay surrounded by mangroves. There are interpretive signs along the trail discussing the ecology of the forest and I believe this is the best way to see the mangroves up close, short of a boat tour.
Three species of mangrove occur here including the less common White Mangrove. It is best identified by the paired glands at the base of the leaf. These glands excrete the salt that accumulates in the White Mangrove from living in a saltwater rich environment. Settlers would use these leaves as a source of salt. Yes, I tasted the back of a leaf and they are quite salty.
In addition to the mangroves, the trail also had excellent specimens of Leather Fern, whose fronds can be up to 10 feet long,
and a variety of bromelaids on the trees. Bromelaids are a type of epiphyte, a plant that uses another plant for support, while acquiring water and nutrients out of the air. Bromelaids are an oasis of fresh water amongst this land of salt water. Other types of epiphytes are orchids, ferns, and mosses. Rainwater collects at the base of the bromelaids, acting as a mini-pond, and is a haven for frogs, small snakes, insects and other wildlife. Two species of mosquitoes are entirely dependent on these little tanks of water for their lifecycle.
As we drove Main Park Road we noted an immense area of dead trees to one side, near the Christian Point Trailhead. When we asked the boat tour naturalist about it, she told us that the die off was the result of Hurricane Irma in 2017. Storm surge flooded the bowl-shaped, low lying area with salt water. The water did not drain for months and eventually suffocated the trees. The thoughts are that the concentrated salts and the altered soil microbial life may have contributed to the death. At Christian Point over 100 acres of mangrove forest died. Throughout South Florida nearly 25,000 acres of mangrove forest died.
You can note the mangrove root structure of the dead tree snags in the photo below.
At the suggestion of the naturalist we tried to observe the destruction and nature’s attempted recovery by hiking the Christian Point Trail, but had to abort the attempt after about 100 feet as the trail was too muddy. During our short passage we did note these two juvenile White Ibises feeding. I think that their mud-spattered state reflects the condition of the trail perfectly. We feared that we would look the same if we continued.
Another rewarding misadventure was a planned trip to tour the decommissioned Nike Missile Installation in the Royal Palm area of the Everglades. The missile site was a product of the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis. We were looking forward to a one hour self-guided tour of the facility, but the gate never opened. The explanation given to us over the phone by the Welcome Center was that they presumed that the volunteer failed to show. That did however give us time to study a sinkhole that we had noted on our drive in. It was perhaps 50 feet from the road. These photos demonstrate the subsurface limestone that dominates the region’s ecology. The limestone is a concretion of corals from an ancient sea and it is overlaid by the thinnest of soils, a condition that inhibits trees and shrubs from encroaching on “the sea of grass”. Softer areas in the limestone breakdown due to acids in decaying plants, resulting in the sinkholes. The sinkholes that develop are a life line that allow many forms of wildlife to survive the dry season. Water from the surface seeps into the depressions. Walking from the road to the sinkhole revealed how little organic matter there was between the limestone and the sole of my boot.
As a tree guy, one thing that intrigued me as we looked across the horizon were the tree groupings in the distance, which take two forms. If the trees are primarily cypress as in the first photo below, that is termed a dome. If the trees are other hardwoods or pines, as seen in the second photo below, it is called a hammock. Interestingly these clusters of trees occur for opposite reasons. Cypress domes actually occur in low lying areas were the underlying limestone has eroded away and are wet for longer periods of the year – an ecological advantage for cypress species. Hammocks of pines and tropical trees on the other hand, develop on sites that are minimally elevated in relation to the surrounding grassland – a change that allows woody plants to grow. Organic debris from these plants results in the accumulation of humus which leads to some element of soil, a scarcity on the Everglades landscape. On my swamp tromp as a 16 year old, these were our goal – and they were again this visit. Tree hammocks will be featured in a couple of future articles.
As we drove, the dominant feature was the “sea of grass”, composed primarily of Saw Grass, which at times extended for miles in every direction. But in reality, Saw Grass is not a grass – it is a sedge, a family of grass-like plants that can tolerate having its roots in water for months at a time. Grasses won’t survive that. The descriptive “saw” refers to the sharp teeth like projections on edges of the blades.
Stopping along the road, this was its composition in late January – semi-green, 18-24 inch blades, and generally no water.
But within those blankets of grass, we would sometimes find bits of color from wildflowers.
Purple Thistle can survive in the harshest of environments.
Marsh Pink is a southern, wetland cousin of the Meadow Pink that is frequently seen in prairies.
Showy Squarestem is also known as Salt and Pepper due to the white of the flower petals and black of the anthers. It is an important nectar plant for butterflies.
Water Pimpernel, as the name suggests, likes moist soils, and it blooms all year.
In summary, this is the first of several essays on our Everglades experience. Our hope is that our efforts will help others get the most out of their visit to the Everglades. We had a great time in less than ideal weather conditions – mostly cool, overcast days. But the stage – the Everglades – is worth the effort. The collection of habitats exposed us to so many things that we had never seen or appreciated before. As always in nature, the key is to slow down and live in the now. Let nature come to you, because in the Everglades it will. We did two full days in the Everglades – the naturalist in me would have liked at least one more – but the history, architecture, and dining of Key West were calling us – so we had to answer the call. And we got another 4 hours on the beautiful Florida Keys’ Overseas Highway – another thing to put on your bucket list.
Footpathsblog.com posts are released every Sunday morning and some bonus content is added periodically. Please click on a social media icon above to follow for future posts and to make sure that you catch all our reflections on, and adventures with, the great outdoors.
Photo credits to Peggy Juengling Burns, with the exception of the sink hole photos by Patrick Burns.
Overview:
Location – west of Homestead, Florida, 134 miles from Key West. We purchased the Shaka audio guide app to the Overseas Highway to animate our drive from Key West to Homestead and it was well worth the price.
Accommodations – The only lodging available inside the park is at the Flamingo Lodge, which is administered by the National Park Service. For the other areas in the Everglades one would stay outside the park at commercial businesses.
Camping – the Shark River and Gulf Coast areas only have backcountry, primitive camping, generally on elevated platforms called chickies, which must be reached by boat. There are no RV campsites in these areas inside the park. The Homestead district area has both backcountry camping on chickies, as well as primitive and RV sites at the Long Pine Key and Flamingo campgrounds.
Parking – many paved lots and pull offs.
Facilities – restrooms at the visitor centers, the marina, the lodge restaurant, and the picnic areas in the park.
Trail Conditions – boardwalk, asphalt, and bare dirt.
Park Map Link – https://gisgeography.com/everglades-national-park-map/
Picnic Tables – in the formal picnic areas.
Kids – four and over should do well.
Dogs – are prohibited on the trails and the park website suggests that you leave them at home.
Links