Travel
Visiting the Everglades
The physical features of the Everglades are beyond description, beauty and charm, blending in a strange, sweet sense of mystery. – Encyclopedia Americana, 1918.
This area of untamed beauty, abundant with wildlife and tropical growth, may become as famous a mecca for travel-minded Americans as Yellowstone National Park. - Popular Mechanics, Feb. 1948
Visitors to the Everglades have been coming to this region since the 16th century, when Spanish explorers first “toured” the River of Grass often with the help of Native Americans and their dugout canoes. Today, Everglades National Park has become a famous destination just as writers predicted when the Park was dedicated by President Harry Truman in December 1947. While Everglades National Park may be the crown jewel, the greater Everglades ecosystem offers abundant opportunities to explore nature.
Opportunities abound in an area that stretches from the Kissimmee River to Lake Okeechobee and runs through the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge and Big Cypress National Preserve to Florida Bay, Biscayne National Park and Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuge. And that’s only part of it all. This vast Everglades area contains some of the most unique hiking, canoeing, kayaking, fishing, camping, bird watching, bicycling, boating and diving experiences in the world.
Here you will find everything from the elusive Florida panther to the American bald eagle, from giant bass to stone crabs, from alligators and crocodiles to wood storks and roseate spoonbills. Everglades area visitors can see strands of hardwood trees including gumbo-limibo, mahogany, live oak, red maple and more. These areas are home to white-tailed deer, green tree frogs and endangered red-cockaded woodpecker. In the pinelands, there are nearly 200 varieties of tropical plants. Endangered mangrove fox squirrels and eastern indigo snakes can be found here along with opossums, cotton mice, red-shouldered hawks and pygmy rattle snakes.
Florida Bay, one of the largest bodies of water in the Everglades ecosystem, is home to manatees, sea turtles, stingrays, sea trout, barracudas, sharks and the Cape Sable seaside sparrow. Biscayne National Park, which is 95 percent water, is one of the top scuba diving locations in the United States. It lies south of Miami and at the northern edge of the Florida Keys.
Whatever journey you decide to make – such as enjoying the quiet solitude of canoeing and kayaking among the Ten Thousand Islands or the excitement of an airboat ride or swamp buggy tour – there are many ways to explore the Everglades. These links will help you get started:
Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge
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