Hiking in Everglades National Park offers experiences ranging from wheelchair-accessible boardwalks and paved trails to rugged adventures in harsh wilderness habitats, including tropical forests filled with poisonous trees, coastal prairies with a base of sticky marl mud, dense mangrove forests dense with mosquitoes, and rugged, swiss-cheese like karst with jagged edges.
Most of the hikes in the Everglades are short and tame, letting you sample these wild habitats – and their delicate inhabitants, like the liguus tree snails – without plunging into the thick of them. But for those who like their wilderness wild, two backpacking trips – Old Ingraham Highway and Coastal Prairie Trail – provide the opportunity to get out there on your own, and several lengthier day hikes, including Christian Point, Bear Lake, and Rowdy Bend, provide an excellent immersion into the world’s only Everglades.
Everglades National Park – Anhinga Trail - For most visitors, the Anhinga Trail is their first and perhaps only glimpse into Everglades National Park. Its proximity to the park entrance guarantees its popularity, and wildlife here is so common and complacent you’ll [...]
Everglades National Park – Bayshore Loop - Providing a walk through the mangrove-lined edge of Florida Bay and the unique coastal prairie habitat within a short loop, the Bayshore Loop is an excellent sampler of what some of the Flamingo area’s longer [...]
Everglades National Park – Bear Lake Trail - Paralleling the former Homestead Canal, an attempt by early developers to drain the coastal prairies around Cape Sable, the Bear Lake Trail takes you on a journey down an old road built of limestone fill [...]
Everglades National Park – Bobcat Boardwalk - The Bobcat Boardwalk at Shark Valley is a popular destination in winter and spring to see migratory and nesting birds. Most visitors opt to bike or take the tram around the 14-mile paved loop through [...]
Everglades National Park – Christian Point Trail - The Christian Point Trail is one of the more challenging trails in Everglades National Park, This is one of the more challenging trails in Flamingo, especially after the storm surge damage of Hurricanes Katrina and [...]
Everglades National Park – Coastal Prairie Trail - Ready for a hard-core Florida wilderness challenge? The rangers at the Flamingo Visitor Center don’t recommend you hike this trail, but they’ll still issue you a backcountry permit for camping if you insist. Consider it [...]
Everglades National Park – Eco Pond - One of the perrenial destinations for birding in Everglades National Park, Eco Pond sits near the end of the Main Park Road in Flamingo. During the 2005 hurricanes, a wave of salt water washed across [...]
Everglades National Park – Gumbo Limbo Trail - At Royal Palm Hammock, home of the Anhinga Trail, the Gumbo Limbo Trail is a paved path that gets you up close and personal with a tropical hammock. This was once called Paradise Key, owned [...]
Everglades National Park – Guy Bradley Trail - In the early 1900s, naturalists were well aware of the vast bird life in the Everglades, and so were plume hunters, looking to cash in on the use of heron plumage as a New York [...]
Everglades National Park – Mahogany Hammock Trail - Tree islands are tropical oases in the Everglades “river of grass,” punctuating the sawgrass prairie where there is a slight bit of elevation, enough to make an enormous difference in the flora. I’ve always loved [...]
Everglades National Park – Old Ingraham Highway - Opened in 1922 as the first motorway to Flamingo, the Old Ingraham Highway saw its share of Model Ts and other roadsters as intrepid motorists made their way down to the small fishing village on [...]
Everglades National Park – Otter Cave Hammock Trail - Complementing Shark Valley’s popular bike and tram trail and Bobcat Boardwalk, the Otter Cave Trail gets you out into the Everglades at a walking pace, where you’ll see much more wildlife. Although the park considers [...]
Everglades National Park – Pa-Hay-Okee Boardwalk - Pa-Hay-Okee is the Seminole word for “River of Grass,” the name Marjorie Stoneman Douglas bestowed on the Everglades while advocating to have the region protected as a National Park. This trail is a short boardwalk [...]
Everglades National Park – Pine Land - One of my favorite Everglades nature trails, Pine Land is a showcase for South Florida’s weird and wonderful karst, a limestone bedrock that’s full of Swiss-cheese like holes, crevices, pits, and tiny caves. Pine rocklands [...]
Everglades National Park – Pinelands Ecotone - Unnamed, un-blazed, and wild, following an old jeep road, the Pinelands Ecotone is an extraordinary hike along the ecotone between two rare habitats – pine rocklands and sawgrass prairies. It immerses you in one of [...]
Everglades National Park – Snake Bight / Rowdy Bend - It’s a wild corner of Florida, where tropical forests meet the mangrove shorelines of Florida Bay, where crocodiles cruise the saline shallows and mosquitoes thicken the air. It’s getting even wilder these days, with the [...]
Everglades National Park – West Lake - At West Lake, the Mangrove Trail loops through a forest that has seen its share of hurricane-related damage, from salty mud flats deposited by Hurricane Donna to the storm surges of 2005 from Hurricanes Katrina [...]
