I was going to save this location for a later date, but we’re having our first cold snap here in Wisconsin and I miss the warmth already. The Everglades, however, is not about warmth. It’s a vanishing, unique ecosystem that I’m lucky to have visited multiple times over the first winter we were on the road: 2020-2021.

I made this graphic at the time, and boy am I glad. Seems like so long ago, and I had a lot to learn about travel when we were at these places.

We started up at Big Cypress National Preserve, pretty much directly across from Miami, then went south to the “Flamingo” area of the Everglades National Park, then up to a campground called Long Pine Key (still in the Everglades but privately run), then down to the Keys for a six-week stay (which will get their own post, later), then back up to Long Pine again.

Most of my posts about the area are structured by certain hikes we took, which will get boring if I list the hike name then show a bunch of similar photos of trees and alligators, so I’ll try to combine these best I can and mix it up a little. All the same, this text is excerpts from those posts so I can pass on to you my impressions at the time, not in retrospect.

What we learned: The Everglades is really one giant, shallow, slow-moving river on top of a limestone shelf. It’s 60 miles wide and over 100 miles long, flowing south to Florida Bay at end of the state. From Wikipedia: “The Everglades experiences a wide range of weather patterns, from frequent flooding in the wet season to drought in the dry season. Throughout the 20th century, the Everglades suffered significant loss of habitat and environmental degradation.”

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Thanksgiving at Big Cypress

We’re at the very north edge of the Everglades, at Big Cypress National Preserve. 

Our campground is just a paved loop around a pond, with alligator warning signs every few feet. Our camp host told us as we pulled in, “Now, if y’all go outside at night, shine a flashlight under your rig to make sure no one’s under there.” Yes, m’am, we will. 

We’ve kept Banjo on a short leash, and we left her in the truck while we stopped on our initial swamp sight-seeing drive for Tracy to cast a line every once in a while. 

Thanksgiving: 80 degrees, not too many ants, lots of sky, and palm trees. 

[We then spent three weeks at a resort outside of the Everglades, in Bonito Springs, then we headed back out to the Everglades again.]

December at Flamingo

We’re here at the southern-most spot of the Everglades, Flamingo, to break up our drive to the Keys, plus of course to enjoy this part of the Everglades that’s more grassy and wet than where we spent Thanksgiving.

This campground is also easing us back into campground life. It’s funny how we’d forgotten in just three weeks at the resort what vacation-type campgrounds are like versus live-in communities.

What We Did Miss

Immersion in nature. Even though we’re camped right next to people, the campground itself has nothing but the Everglades to the north and the Gulf to the south (Florida Bay, it’s called here). 

We’ll be here for four days and hope to dip ourselves in both places as much as we can.

We’ve also put up our screened tent! We couldn’t set it up at the resort (rules), but we can here, and I’m so glad to have my outside living room back. Last night Tracy and I listened to music and played cards as the wind blew and the rain misted about, and we were dry and comfy under the full moon.

A Hike on Snake Bight

A bight is a curve along a coastline.

And Snake Bight Trail is one of the busiest trails here in Flamingo, so we hit it at 9:00 am. We were the first so we accidentally scared up the flocks of birds in the mangroves, but the sun was behind the birds, and I didn’t get a single good photo. We saw hundreds of white ibis, great egrets, and even groups of roseate spoonbills. Imagine the air around the mangroves full of giant white birds rising to the sky, with occasional pale pink among them. It was the most birds I’ve seen together, ever. And not a robin in view.

Farther down the trail were bromeliads hanging beside us and above us.

Plus various trees I’ve never seen (Tracy left his tree book back at the trailer in favor of the bird book; I walked empty-handed and took pictures).

So, there were almost no birds once we walked out to the water, perhaps because we were there at low tide. But we are so happy to be out in nature again.

We’d planned on hiking a certain hike one morning, but it was way too muddy.  We keep seeing signs that trails have not been maintained due to recent storms, but until this one they’ve been in great shape. But this morning we got a glimpse of what the signs mean. 

We had to climb over fallen mangrove trunks and weave around limbs to get through the wooded part of the hike. 

The wetlands area was a thick layer of sucking mud on top of bedrock that in some places was way below our ankles.

I’d worn my crocs because the last hike was literally a walk in the park, but here they almost got left behind.

Rowdy Bend

So we turned around after a half hour of struggle and tried the Rowdy Ben Trail that leads into yesterday’s Snake Bight Trail. This one was passable.

It looked a bit like walking into Mordor though, with damage done to trees from those recent storms, where all non-salt-water-tolerant trees had been killed.

This had been a large tree covered with that strangling fig, and it all died in the salt water upheaval.

Rising from the low water on the sides of the trail were more of the beautiful water birds I’ve come to know here. White ibis, the brown immature ibis, great blue herons and small blue herons. Osprey, red-shouldered hawk, bald eagles, cormorants, wood storks, white pelicans. My photos stink but my memory will hold, I hope. 

While Tracy was looking at birds, I squatted beside the mud for a long time watching blue crabs hunt and mess around with each other. Some had red-tipped claws like this, and some were bright blue.

! was mesmerized by their slow movements and bubbling mouths. 

Almost back to the truck, and the couple we passed going the other way told us to look out for a dead alligator. We should have been able to find it with our noses. 

My guess is a park ranger had found it dead maybe on the road and brought it back here so people wouldn’t stop to gawk, but its body was nevertheless a mystery. Something or someone had pulled the skin from its tail off over its body to over its head. But not taken the skin. Vultures had picked the bones clean, but the dried skin remained, inside out and hard (Tracy poked it with a stick.)

What a strange thing to find. Maybe tomorrow we’ll find something stranger!

Sunrise Service

We’re camped just a quick walk from Florida Bay—in fact, if we swam directly out we’d end up on Big Pine Key for our next reservations. If only the Airstream floated. 🙂

This morning instead of walking out to see the sunrise, I rode my bike. The scene before me as I approached the coastline was of a sunrise workshop service. The silhouettes of about 20 people stood out against the water, all facing the sunrise, all watching (well, some fishing).

The sky was not especially startling (not violent, as I’ve read in a poem), but everyone was out worshiping it nevertheless. Flat land leading to flat water, with the sun popping up the way it does, like an egg yoke you’re afraid might break with the force.

Here it is in my bike mirror as I rode away after worship service was over.

Back in the Everglades Again

Out where a friend is a friend
Where the big mosquitoes feed
And the lowly hikers bleed
Back in the Everglades again.

Long Pine Key campground is managed by the same private company that manages the one in Flamingo, even though the Everglades is a national park. Tracy thinks this was Reagan’s bright idea. Note the sarcasm, since the state park campgrounds we’ve been to are much better kept up. Whatever, we are here and enjoying it. 

Gumbo Limbo Trail

This first morning here, we thought we’d beat the crowds to a nearby trail, and we plumb forgot the major VULTURE WARNING we’d read about. I’m not kidding. Vultures hang around the parking lots at trail heads and perch on top of cars, picking at any exposed rubber, especially windshield wiper blades.

When we pulled in to this trail head lot, there was a flock of them on top of a rental red convertible, trying to pick their way through the roof. No kidding. That car, like most in the lot, had a tarp on it, but I guess convertibles are so irresistible to vultures that they loosened the tarp.

We grabbed two tarps plus bungee cords from the bin at the ranger station and did our best for the kayaks. (Spoiler: after our hike, the kayaks and truck wiper blades had been unmolested.)

Gumbo Limbo is a tree we’ve seen down here before; it’s also known as the tourist tree because the deep red bark peels. 

This tree hammock is lush with an undergrowth of ferns and plenty of strangler figs. 

Anhinga Trail

Gumbo Limbo is surrounded by a slough (pronounced “slew”) that’s a freshwater river/basin where a variety of wildlife congregate. 

I didn’t get good images, but we saw tons of freshwater, bright, big fish swimming right below the boardwalk that took us over the slough, plus lots of water birds, including the purple gallinule, which I’d thought Tracy was making up until I spotted it myself. Gorgeous. 

We saw this cute guy all by himself. I wonder where his siblings are?

The Everglades at Night

It’s nice to be back in the dark and the quiet. The night we arrived, the stars were bright (we caught glimpses as we ran from the screened tent to the trailer and back; we didn’t risk sitting outside the tent because of the mosquitoes). 

It’s also alarmingly quiet here after Sunshine Key RV Park, where people turned on their outside TVs to Fox News and kept them on all evening. No joke. In the Everglades at night we can hear our neighbors zip their tent, and that’s about it. 

A Vast Quiet

When you look out over the sawgrass prairie here in the Everglades—where we’ve been hiking through a very wide, shallow river—you can see far across to the horizon, across limestone flats, with zero signs of mankind. 

The quiet around you seems surreal. Like time has stopped. 

In reality there are roads nearby, like this one to a missile site used during the Cuban Crisis. During our bike ride through the wind that pushed us across the prairie, we saw one parade of cars, driving from point A to point B on a guided tour. They weren’t going anywhere.

This is not civilization. When you’re in the Everglades, you don’t really remember civilization. You feel out, in the margins, away from any landscape you’re used to, away from the rest of the world. 

Here we’ve seen beautiful wading birds. Reptiles, from giant alligators to tiny lizards, a toad stuck in Banjo’s water bowl, and a really big rattlesnake booking it out of our campsite and into the sawgrass. So many redshouldered hawks. 

They show little regard for us walking through their world. I feel like a shadow in someone else’s land. 

Goodbye, quiet, receding Everglades. I hope there’s enough of you left when I return one day.