Everyone who has never been there knows what the Everglades are. They are swamps. Dark, murky places with exposed tree roots with lots of Spanish moss hanging from the overhead branches.
Everyone is wrong. The Everglades are a collections of nine different ecosystems none of which is called swamp. They are: 1. Marine and Estuarine, 2. Coastal marsh, 3. Mangrove, 4. Cypress, 5. Coastal Prairie, 6. Freshwater Slough, 7. Pineland, 8. Freshwater Marl Prairie, and 9. Hardwood Hammock.
Much of the Everglades is a river called the Shark River Slough which is 50 miles wide and 80 miles long whose depth is often measured in inches. It looses only 14 feet of elevation over that 80 miles which makes a grade of only o.003%. But that grade is enough to keep this fresh water moving.
Sawgrass grows in that water. The grass hides the water from view at ground level so it looks like any prairie, but if you walk out into the river of grass you’ll get wet. Today you need to walk a little further out, though, since we were here during the dry season. You can see dirt at the front edge of this scene where there will be water when the rainy season starts.
In this river of grass are places where the dirt piled up a little more allowing trees to take root there. These are Hardwood Hammocks.
We drove Flamingo Road deep into the park and saw several of the ecosystems.
From the Pa-hay-okee Overlook Trail Dave saw these:
And from the Mahogany Hammock Trail he saw these:
This is a Poisonwood Tree. Don’t touch.
If you have a canoe or kayak you can follow one of the canoe trails into a backcountry campsite to get a real feel for this wilderness. We camped at Long Pine Key in the Pineland and at Flamingo in the Coastal Prairie.
The Coastal Prairie exists only because of hurricanes. Storm surge smothers the roots of trees then the prairies grows in the sediment left behind. Hurricanes help other trees. This one made its way to the light when trees around it were knocked down.
One thing you don’t want to knock you down is one of these:
They call them panthers here. I always thought panthers were black. These are a tawny color which I always thought were called cougars. The music in my head, though, belongs to the Pink Panther.
TTYL
Linda
Our family went canoeing in the mangroves in the big wide river when we were here in 1996. It was awesome. Also, easy to get lost! The Everglades is the only place I would like to revisit in Florida.