When visited: February 25, 2022 with Missy; March 10, 2015 with TJ and 1970s with parents
When Established: 1947
Park ranking: 43 out of 63
Highlight: Alligators, Manatees, Wetlands, Birdlife, World Heritage Site, Third Largest National Park
Why not to go: If you don’t like alligators, pythons, swamps etc.
By February, 2022, Missy and I only had 9 parks to go! We set a goal to finish all of the continental U.S. parks and Alaska parks in 2022 leaving American Samoa as the last park to visit! We have friends that live in Miami and they graciously allowed us to stay with them as a base to visit both Biscayne National Park and Everglades National Park. We also combined this with a flight to St. Thomas for the US Virgin Islands National Park and a drive to Key West to explore Dry Tortugas National Park.
I had been to the Everglades at least twice before. When I was a child, my grandparents “snow birded “in Florida for the winter. While their winter home was in Lakeland, Florida, they had friends that lived in Fort Lauderdale that I remember visiting. On one visit, we went to the Everglades to see the alligators. That was the first time I recall seeing an alligator. Another time, I remember being extremely disappointed that we drove “Alligator Alley” in southern Florida from the west coast to the east coast and didn’t see any alligators on the drive. (Not that you do during the drive but how was a child to know?)
Manatee in Everglades National Park near the Guy Bradley Visitor Center
I also visited the Everglades in 2015 as part of a Spring Training trip with my oldest son TJ. He was on spring break from college and we are both Mets fans, so we flew to West Palm and saw several games at Port St. Lucie and Jupiter. On one of the days, we travelled to the Guy Bradley Visitor Center at Flamingo. We were impressed by the swaying grasslands on our drive while looking out for black panthers and pythons. Unfortunately, we saw neither, but we did stop at several areas and enjoyed spotting the alligators at Paurotis Pond and Nine Mile Pond. We walked the flat Snake Blight Trail to search for water birds. We made our way to the Visitor’s Center and bought our tickets for the boat ride through the mangroves on the 90 minute Backcountry Boat Tour. While waiting for the tour we spotted manatees in the pond area at Flamingo and enjoyed watching them. That was a first manatee sighting for me. We enjoyed our boat ride and made the return drive back to our hotel in Port St Lucie.
Missy and I started our Florida national park trip at Biscayne Bay as previously posted. On the next day we arranged a full day Everglades Adventure Tour with a Wet Walk with WildLimeAdventures.com.
Wild Lime Adventures was our guide through our day in the Everglades
We met our tour company at the location of our first adventure of three for the day. Wild Lime partners with a native family to arrange a 60 to 70 minute VIP Air Boat Trip in the “River of Grass” region of the Everglades. Our partner company was Buffalo Tiger Airboat Rides. We loaded onto our airboats and travelled at high speeds through the river of glass in search of alligators. We found several different areas where they were enjoying their day. We stopped the air boat and were able to spend several minutes observing the animals.
The Everglades is a great place to air boat and see alligators!
We also stopped to travel onto a Native tree island where they used to live and explore.
View from the back of our airboat – a sea of grass
After that adventure, we were off to our wet walk in Big Cypress National Preserve. We walked through the wet areas and observed many types of plant life including flora like ferns, bromeliads, and orchids! The walk occurred in the Fakahatchee, often referred to as the “Amazon of North America,” or in Big Cypress National Preserve, the spectacular western Everglades. This wilderness is also home to the Florida panther, black bear, Florida bobcat, an incredible variety of turtles and fish, a wide array of bird species, alligators and more! We saw none of those but we had a memorable time in our boots sloshing through the water and truly experiencing the wet forest.
Water over your boots in search of plants and animals
Interesting plant life including orchids
After the wet hike we made our way to the 10,000 Islands Region of the park and spent 90 minutes on a boat trip through the islands system. We saw dolphins, ospreys and pelicans but no roseate spoonbills. We did explore some man-made shell islands by boat and we were able to see those up close. Over the years, islands were created by continuing to stack shells to be able to build the island out of the water.
Hard to fathom islands constructed on the shells
After our boat trip, we were pretty exhausted and said thank you to our guide and headed back to our friends’ home in Miami.
We made one last visit to the Everglades on March 7th our last day in Florida. Missy and I repeated the drive that TJ and I had done in 2015 and we went to the Visitors Center in Flamingo and saw manatees and walked the Snake Blight Trail.
The Everglades is an incredible ecosystem unlike anywhere else in the US. We saw manatees, alligators, dolphins, pelicans and ospreys. We travelled through the 10,000 islands, through the river of grass, wet hiked through the swamps and walked the Snake Blight Trail to search for bird life. We are thankful that the efforts to preserve this unique area continue. It’s going to be a continual challenge to eradicate the pythons and to protect the panthers and to protect it from the greatest threat – ourselves as “progress” continues to threaten this unique area
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