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February 2003

Everglades National Park

David Aaronson
2005-09-29 14:53:21

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The photos below are primarily from a trip taken in February 2003 although we've included some older pictures as we've been traveling to the Everglades and surrounding region regularly for many years. Most of the commentary is sort of our collective opinion and advice to those who are visiting for this first time.

The Everglades is basically a very wide, very shallow river flowing from the Lake Okeechobee basin southwest to the Gulf Of Mexico. Most of the Everglades is a vast featureless marsh. It might look like there are features in this photo but one clump of pines and palmettos looks very like another after a few hours of hiking or paddling (1).

Unlike many national parks, the Everglades has no one awesome dominating sight to see. There is no real postcard view of the place, in fact very few geographical features even have names. That is partially because it changes rather quickly compared to a mountain landscape. Hurricanes, forest fires and the mobility of mangrove islands mean that a section of the Everglades might look substantially different than it does now in just a few years. The boardwalk is at Mahogany Hammock, one of the more stable areas in the park and the only easy access to a hammock environment. A hammock in this case is a mound that is a few inches higher than the surrounding marsh, and thus larger foliage can survive there leading to a sort of mini-jungle.

There is an area in Everglades national park called the Pinelands which is a relatively high stable forest area primarily composed of pines (3). The rest of it is marsh although there are subtle variations. This area is a coastal prairie or salt marsh. If you were to walk across this it could easily go from solid sandy ground to a few inches of mud and water to a deep pool. This makes backcountry hiking more or less impossible. In fact, backcountry hiking in the Everglades is technically known as slogging and there are ...