The Everglades Is Certainly one of America’s Most Ignored Nationwide Parks—Why You Ought to Go to

At Shark Valley, I took a rental bike and set off within the route of an remark tower. The trail led throughout a watery prairie feathered with noticed grass. It was late within the day, and I used to be alone. Nice blue herons watched me from behind banks of water lilies. Dragonflies balanced on the ideas of the grass. A nightjar handed, flying low with its mouth open for bugs. Not removed from the trail, on a raised island of bushes, a dozen turkey vultures had gathered: a malevolent welcoming committee, folding and unfolding their wings, hopping from perch to perch.

From the highest of the remark tower I regarded out over an unlimited sea of grass, rippling with waves of wind, damaged right here and there by cypresses. Everglades Nationwide Park is like no place I’ve ever seen. This might have been the world after the Flood, slim tongues of land solely simply rising because the waters retreated. It appeared a world half-made, a spot of base components—land, water, and sky—organized in sweeping horizontal bands. 

However the simplicity is misleading. The Everglades are a posh pure world, and one of the biodiverse habitats in North America. Occupying an awesome swath of southern Florida, the park teems with life in unusual and complicated varieties—vegetation that take in vitamins from the air; bushes that develop knee-deep in water; antediluvian alligators weighing as much as a thousand kilos; elusive panthers that stalk, ghostlike, by means of the evening; marine mammals as soon as mistaken for mermaids; fish that stroll on land.

The Everglades haven’t at all times been a nationwide treasure, a spot of household adventures and completely happy campers. When the Spanish arrived in southern Florida within the sixteenth century, they discovered a number of Native American tribes, amongst them the Calusa, who had been established within the space for hundreds of years. By the 18th century, an Indigenous inhabitants of greater than 20,000 had been diminished to some hundred by European aggression, settlement, and illness. 

In these days the Everglades have been seen as Florida’s ghastly yard, a area of fearsome reptiles and unsavory characters. Within the mid 1800s, the primary authorities report on the Everglades didn’t sugarcoat it: “Appropriate just for the hang-out of noxious vermin, or the resort of pestilential reptiles,” the inspectors intoned. By the tip of the nineteenth century, when America’s western frontier was largely settled, this was America’s final wilderness: tough, intractable, harmful. Nicely into the twentieth century, there was a cry to “drain the swamp” in order that this wasteland could possibly be included within the improvement of southern Florida. 

However in 1947, President Harry Truman signed Everglades Nationwide Park into existence, quoting Psalm 23, “He leadeth me beside nonetheless waters. He restoreth my soul.” In the present day the better Everglades ecosystem, which covers an space in regards to the dimension of Connecticut, is prized as the biggest subtropical wilderness in america. The nationwide park is the third largest within the Decrease 48, behind solely Demise Valley and Yellowstone. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage web site, an Worldwide Biosphere Reserve, and a Wetland of Worldwide Significance. Round one million individuals go to every year. The clamor to empty this swamp has been silenced; Individuals have begun to see the Everglades because the nation’s very personal Backyard of Eden. 

I headed west on the Tamiami Path, the unique freeway between Miami and Tampa. I needed to go to Everglades Metropolis, which is near the Ten Thousand Island archipelago, off the western coast of Florida. It was late March, and temperatures have been within the mid 70s. This was the dry season, which runs from December to April: the perfect time to go to, earlier than the arrival of mosquitoes and uncomfortable warmth. 

The freeway handed the sort of roadside sights which have been bringing vacationers to the Everglades for many years—an alligator farm, swamp excursions, and airboats, these deafening vessels skimming throughout the marshes which might be an icon of the Everglades. Banks of clouds scudded away throughout the grasslands towards the Gulf of Mexico. Farther west, the companies fell away and the two-lane blacktop ran like a dominated line all the way in which to the horizon. I started to really feel the immensity of the place. 

The Everglades are the results of an uncommon and inefficient drainage system. The waters of Florida’s Kissimmee River circulate into Lake Okeechobee, the biggest lake within the South and one of many largest in America. Okeechobee is an unlimited, shallow bowl, a lot of it barely 12 ft deep and with no pure outlet. Previously its waters merely rose over the low lip of the lake in an unlimited sheet and started to seep slowly southward throughout the flatlands of southern Florida. It’s this sluggish circulate that created the Everglades’ singular ecosystem. 

The early twentieth century noticed the introduction of dams, dredging, canals, and floodgates to divert and drain the waters of the Everglades. The development of the Tamiami Path within the Nineteen Twenties blocked the water’s circulate. A federal-state partnership, referred to as the Complete Everglades Restoration Plan, is undoing a lot of this ill-advised intervention and restoring the pure order of issues, whereas nonetheless offering ingesting water for 9 million Floridians. 

In Everglades Metropolis, I parked on a quiet avenue bordered by manicured lawns. Within the Nineteen Twenties and 30s, this was a busy cease on the Gulf Coast. It had a practice station, a hospital, a sawmill, a laundry, a financial institution—the Financial institution of the Everglades—and the one streetcar south of Tampa. However as improvement regularly ebbed away to Naples and different elements of the state, the inhabitants dwindled. In the present day the outdated city appears to have retreated right into a sort of sleepy Norman Rockwell innocence: the distant drone of a garden mower, the decision of children enjoying catch, the smoky aromas of a barbecue. Sportfishing boats are moored alongside the Barron River, and tour boats set off on excursions by means of the Ten Thousand Islands every morning. Nowadays, Everglades Metropolis isn’t a lot of a metropolis: the 2020 census recorded a inhabitants of 352. 

Reverse the outdated Everglades financial institution is the Rod & Gun Membership, which grew out of an Nineties buying and selling submit. The place is a juicy slice of Americana with its darkish picket furnishings and flooring, tasseled lampshades, wicker chairs on a screened porch, vintage money register, and a bar lined with stuffed bobcats and mounted deer heads. After I checked in I noticed an enormous alligator head, mouth agape, presiding over reception. Probably the most characterful locations to remain in South Florida, the Rod & Gun has hosted 5 presidents and a listing of celebrities that runs the gamut from John Wayne to Mick Jagger. 

Again within the automobile, I adopted the street by means of Everglades Metropolis and throughout an extended causeway to the village of Chokoloskee, which sits on a mound of sand and shells left by the Calusa individuals. Standing on the shore is the Smallwood Retailer, a buying and selling submit opened in 1906. Listed on the Nationwide Register of Historic Locations, it’s now a non-public museum. Raised on stilts to protect in opposition to rogue tides and hurricanes, it bought all the things required for pioneer life in these elements. Alongside the stable wooden counters I browsed blacksmith’s instruments, containers of buttons, rolls of cloth, old style crockery, cooking pots the dimensions of washtubs, washtubs the dimensions of bathtubs, tall barrels of nails, movie magazines of the Nineteen Twenties, Native American weaving, black-and-white postcards, and outdated drugs bottles. Stepping outdoors onto the rickety balcony, I discovered a pelican perched on the railing, eyeing the channel for fish. 

In 1910, when the one entry to Chokoloskee was by boat, it was the scene of a mob killing. Among the many many outcasts in search of their fortune on this distant a part of the pioneer Everglades was Edgar Watson, a sugar planter, alligator hunter, and alleged serial killer. Wherever he went, Watson left a path of suspicious deaths behind him. In Chokoloskee, his neighbors determined that they had had sufficient. One night, vigilantes lay in anticipate him on the touchdown stage of the Smallwood Retailer. It was nightfall when Watson got here up the channel in his small boat. He docked and stepped ashore. When he refused to place down his gun, the mob opened fireplace. Nobody was ever convicted. 

Heading east once more, I turned onto a backcountry path referred to as Loop Street and drove its 25 miles of gravel with out seeing one other soul. Shut on both facet have been eerie woods flooded with shallow swamp water, the bushes’ shaggy trunks festooned with air vegetation and the occasional ghost orchid. After I stopped to gaze into the darkish swimming pools across the ft of the bushes, I noticed alligator eyes breaking the floor, gazing again at me. 

I drove again east towards Miami after which all the way down to the southern entrance of Everglades Nationwide Park, simply outdoors the city of Homestead. Contained in the gates the freeway heads onward, freed from roadside sights, previous signposted boardwalks like Royal Palm, the place a keen-eyed passerby would possibly glimpse extra alligators, or a roseate spoonbill. Mountaineering trails like Pineland, Mahogany Hammock, and Pahayokee Overlook invite treks into watery woods draped in vines and shadows. The park additionally presents canoe trails like Hell’s Bay, the place it’s attainable to paddle by means of the mangroves into the backcountry to camp in a single day on platforms referred to as chickees. I spent the evening at Lengthy Pine Key campsite, the place I listened from my tent to the swamp opera—the hooting of barred owls, the trill of whippoorwills, the drone of cicadas. 

The park street ends at Flamingo, on the shores of island-strewn Florida Bay. A century in the past, this was a rough-and-tumble place usually accessed by boat from the Keys. Its residents have been the standard suspects—moonshiners, prohibition runners, alligator skinners, and plume hunters, who, originally of the twentieth century, have been slowly decimating the hen inhabitants to help the style for unique feathers in girls’s hats. No person bothered giving the place a reputation till the opening of a submit workplace necessitated one. The settlers thought-about calling it the Finish of the World. As a substitute they opted for Flamingo, for the birds that lived there within the spring and summer season. 

The outdated city has regularly disappeared, changed by a set of good-looking park buildings that embody a guests’ heart, a grocery and deal with retailer, and the park’s licensed concessionaire, Flamingo Adventures, which runs a restaurant, a lodge, and a splendid tented camp and presents boat leases and excursions. The guests’ heart is called for Man Bradley, a hero of the Everglades. A plume hunter turned conservationist, he was murdered in 1905 by his former searching colleagues—one other Everglades crime that nobody was ever held accountable for. 

I had pushed to Flamingo to lease a houseboat and discover Whitewater Bay, a big inlet of the Gulf of Mexico. The houseboat was not maybe probably the most elegant of vessels—mainly a field on pontoons—however its shallow draft made it ideally suited to situations out on the bay. There have been fore and aft decks, a few bedrooms, a toilet, a galley kitchen, and the heady promise of being captain of my very own boat. 

After the momentary distraction of watching a pair of ospreys carry fish to their nest of squawking chicks, then a sighting of manatees floating throughout the harbor, I climbed aboard with a number of luggage of groceries and a rising anxiousness about my nautical competence. Captain Nick Segwick piloted me by means of the Buttonwood Canal to Whitewater Bay. A white-bearded fellow who lives on a catamaran among the many islands of Florida Bay, Segwick was a pleasant echo of the outdated Everglades—a refugee from the world of city modernity, savoring a less complicated life. Between mentioning the tricolored herons alongside the banks as in the event that they have been private associates, he mused on life within the Everglades. “There’s a feeling of freedom down right here,” he stated. “That’s what I really like.” And with that he wished me good luck and stepped onto a motor launch again to Flamingo. 

I spent the subsequent two days on Whitewater Bay, navigating among the many low mangrove islands, anchoring in inlets at evening. There was nobody else on the market, bar the occasional distant fishing boat. Sky and water appeared to merge. The reflections of clouds drifted throughout the polished floor of the lake between the islands. Bottlenose dolphins appeared, swimming alongside the boat for some time, so shut I may have reached down and stroked them. 

Above all, Whitewater Bay was outlined by its huge congregations of birds. White terns swept elegantly backwards and forwards, diving out of the blue on sprays of bait. Black skimmers swooped low over their very own reflections. Pelicans bombed into the water like boys at a public swimming pool. Cormorants perched on useless branches, spreading their wings to dry. Stalking the shorelines have been herons, curve-billed ibises, sandpipers, and whimbrels. My favourite was an attractive roseate spoonbill tiptoeing throughout a mudflat, its invoice like a spatula, its physique flushed pink. Above me, the abiding picture of the Everglades: birds of prey slicing darkish calligraphic figures in limitless skies. There have been hawks and turkey vultures, their wing suggestions like fingers, and bald eagles, handing over extensive circles with barely a beat of their wings. 

At sundown, the bay grew to become stained with colour till darkness regularly superior throughout the water. A dense canvas of stars spanned the horizon. When you peered into the water, you may see them there, trembling on its floor. A universe of constellations, come down to satisfy America’s final nice watery wilderness. 

Learn how to Guide

Flamingo Adventures: The park’s licensed concessionaire operates the Flamingo Lodge & Restaurant and a set of glamping tents, in addition to houseboats and campsites. It additionally rents bikes, canoes, and kayaks.

Ranger-Led Packages: Guided hikes, swamp walks, and kayak journeys are provided day by day all through the nationwide park.

A model of this story first appeared within the April 2025 problem of Journey + Leisure beneath the headline “Moist ‘N’ Wild”