The Everglades: Crazy quilt in the wilderness

Part two of three

As national parks go, the Everglades has a bit of an identity crisis, or image problem. While Yellowstone has the Old Faithful geyser, Yosemite has Half Dome and the eponymous Yosemite Valley, Arches has arches and the Rocky Mountain and Great Smoky Mountains parks have, well, mountains, there is no focal point or iconic vista in Everglades National Park, where visitors can pose for photos with something like Mount Rushmore in the background and go home with a snapshot that says “been there, done that.”

What there is in the Everglades is a lot of low-lying, watery landscape, and a tangle of federal, state, local government and private jurisdictions, administered and policed by a host of different agencies. Last week in this space, we mentioned that Everglades National Park and “the Everglades,” the entirety of the swampy, low-lying geographical area in South Florida are distinct from each other, not interchangeable names for the same thing.

Everglades National Park itself protected only about 20 percent of the historical Everglades when it was dedicated in 1947, yet it contains over one and a half million acres, making it the third-largest national park in the continental U.S. The Big Cypress National Preserve to the north of the park takes up another 720,000 acres, and was originally intended to be part of ENP, but was not included because much of the land was still in private hands. Both the park and the preserve are run by the National Park Service, although Big Cypress has less stringent regulation and no admission fees.

The Everglades are made up mostly of two distinct regions. Along the coast, uncounted mangrove islands are interspersed with saltwater channels, making up a vast rookery that spawns birds, fish – and insects – by the millions. North, and inland, the sawgrass prairies stretch for mile after mile, the terrain you pass through when driving on I-75, Alligator Alley, to Fort Lauderdale and the East Coast. These freshwater prairies are dotted periodically with hardwood “hammocks,” where rings of trees encircle ponds, critical to the survival of the local fauna during the dry seasons.

The region once hosted tracts of old-growth cypress, most of which was logged in the first half of the last century. The Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park, an example of state jurisdiction, runs along a slough where 70 years ago loggers built railroads on elevated roadbeds to haul out the felled trees from the swamp. The 20-mile-long ribbon takes in much of the land between Immokalee and Everglades City, and at 85,000 acres is Florida’s largest state park.

Heading back into Naples from the Fakahatchee, which you can do rapidly on the highway or slowly by bumping along Jane’s Scenic Drive through the Fakahatchee slough, you come to the 78,000-acre Picayune Strand State Forest, where a grid of streets was laid out, dredged, canalized and paved for what was supposed to be South Golden Gate Estates. This development was never built, and is the reality behind many “Florida swamp peddling” real estate stories. Restoration of the area is planned as part of the CERP, or Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan.

South of the Picayune Strand is the Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuge, established in 1996 after the Collier family interests, descendants of Barron Collier who founded Collier County and gave it its name, swapped 108,000 acres of wilderness and swamp plus almost $35 million to the federal government in exchange for 68 acres in Phoenix, Arizona. Of that acreage, 35,000 went to make up the Ten Thousand Islands refuge. The rest went to the Big Cypress and the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge, yet another federal enclave, but on more upland terrain to the north.

Abutting the 10,000 Islands reserve is Collier-Seminole State Park, home to the “walking dredge” that excavated the land to run the Tamiami Trail through the ’Glades in the 1920s. Both are filled with the mangroves that form such a critical part of the larger Florida ecosystem.

One parcel of land that is not located in the national park, or any of the other preserves, Everglades City was completely surrounded by ENP and cut off from growth, one reason for development activity and the Collier County seat shifting to Naples. It did find an industry to augment the stone crab fishery, though. Like the uninhabited streets of Southern Golden Gate Estates, the lonely waters offshore from Everglades City helped fuel a marijuana smuggling boom during the end of the last century, with low-flying aircraft touching down after dark on the streets, and bundles of “square grouper” offloaded from fishing and crabbing vessels in Everglades.

Along with all the other law enforcement agencies operating to protect the Everglades, at one time the Drug Enforcement Agency had a significant local presence, and personal experience lets me tell you that if you were out boating in the wee hours, there was a chance of a powerful speedboat with heavily armed men easing alongside to check out your boat. Hundreds were arrested for drug offenses in Everglades City and the surrounding area in the ’80s.

In general, law enforcement comes from National Park rangers in federal jurisdictions, the Florida Freshwater Fish & Wildlife Commission or FWC in state preserves, along with land-based and boat patrols by the various counties. The ENP alone takes up large chunks of Miami-Dade and Monroe Counties along with Collier, while additional preserves and parks extend to the north – the county called Glades is some 50 miles to the north of Naples.

The armed FWC officers are the spiritual descendants of the game wardens who risked, and sometimes lost their lives, attempting to rein in the plume hunters of 100 years ago. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers gets involved in decisions concerning canals and flood mitigation, the U.S. Coast Guard regulates boating and signage on the area’s navigable waterways, and the South Florida Water Management District oversees water resources from Orlando south to the Florida Keys.

The Florida Dept. of Environmental Protection, or DEP, oversees state interests, including the state parks and the granddaddy of the non-ENP preserves, the Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve. From its headquarters between Naples and Marco Island, Rookery Bay manages 110,000 acres covering pinewood flatlands, upland scrub, sawgrass prairies, and mangrove estuaries.

The larger Everglades area also holds both Seminole and Miccosukee Indian reservations, which have their own tribal police, and to some extent are exempt from state laws, and even deal with the national government as sovereign entities, based on the treaties under which they were established. The Miccosukee Indian Reservation has over 82,000 acres in three different parcels, while the Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation contains 52,480 acres.

Depending on what you’re looking for, where you start, and how much mud you will tolerate, there are a host of ways to get into and experience the Everglades, and these will be the topic for our third and final installment in the series.

Next week:

How to have your own Everglades experience