I haven't had a lot of time off lately, or been taking many pictures. This is a conglomerate of shots from the past month or so, mostly from the Everglades area, that is to say south Florida.
There are a lot of great places to enjoy natural south Florida away from the cities and chaos. I have been getting into Everglades National Park, Big Cypress National Preserve Fakahatchee Strand State Park and the Corkscrew Sanctuary (a place I visited as a child with my family). Fakahatchee, Big Cypress and Everglades N.P. are huge and have limitless exploration possibilities, and Corkscrew is probably the best and most pristine chunk of old growth cypress habitat you can find.
Since these trips have taken place over the last month, I will just lay out some of the highlights and not really get into any big stories or details about the trips.
After the first trip to the Everglades I quickly made the decision I will not go back without a kayak or canoe. A lot of the hiking trails were flooded or really muddy, and they have a huge serious of canoe trails. So on the most recent trip I brought a kayak, and found a fantastic canoe trail. Hardly anyone was on it, and it is much more of a thrill to see gators from a kayak at water level than from on land. Probably the best part about it was the mangrove tunnel the trail goes through. It was pretty literally a tunnel formed by red mangrove, barely passible at points because it was so tight, but beautiful.
At the southern most tip of the national park is a camp ground that overlooks the many islands that lead down to the keys. I imagine on a normal day its' nearly one-hundred sites would be full, but my friend and I happened on it during one of the many unseasonably cold days and had the place nearly to ourselves. There is nothing like watching the sun rise over the ocean from your tent.
One of my favorite things about the everglades area is the sounds. There are many places you get yourself where you are completely disconnected from the outside world- and the sounds of the swamps, marshes and forests take me further away in my mind. There is chorus upon chorus of insects and birds. Corkscrew featured the haunting sounds of owls. On a few of the trails I never saw another person, which is an added bonus when you want to just escape. It is a nice change of pace that I need from time to time.
A separate little sad note from my park is about a manatee. This cold spell we have been having this winter is more than just the Florida people being wimps... it has taken it's tole on the wildlife that is not adapted to handle it. There was a dead manatee spotted in one of the water ways of my park about two weeks ago. I got in a kayak, looped a rope around its' tail and started towing it out (which was not at all easy, the thing was pretty big). Then we brought in a boat with a motor and towed it to our launch where a biologist came in with a trailer and a body bag. It was interesting to see it so up close, but sad to hear that they have already seen nearly the same amount of dead manatees in 2010 as they have in all of 2009. The only good thing about the cold is it is also and probably on a larger scale killing non-native animal species that have been an on going problem especially in the everglades.
