Everglades National Park Overview
Everglades National Park is one of three national parks in Florida. It encompasses 2,400 square miles of wetlands in the south end of the state. This massive 1.5 million-acre park is right near Miami and the Florida Keys on the southern tip of Florida. It’s a beautiful place for hiking, boating, cycling and running. There is a lot to do in the park and the NPS website gives a pretty great overview of activities and ranger-led programs. Because it’s a massive park, there are 4 open entrances and visitors centers:
- Gulf Coast Visitors Center (northwest end of the park)
- Shark Valley Visitors Center (east end, closest to Miami)
- Ernest F. Coe Visitors Center (east end, closest to the Keys and in the middle of nowhere)
- Flamingo Visitors Center (southernmost end of the park, water access to the park)
At some point I would love to camp in the Everglades. There are two campgrounds accessible by car: Long Pine Key and Flamingo Campgrounds. You can make reservations ahead of time at the Flamingo Everglades website. There are also wilderness campgrounds that you can get to by water. You can learn more about getting a wilderness permit for those campgrounds at the NPS website.
The Everglades is a great park to visit if you need an accessible experience. There are tram tours, boat tours, and the terrain is flat – so you don’t have to trudge up any steep hills while exploring on foot.
Riding bikes in the Everglades
We knew that we wanted to do a bike ride. Because we were flying in, we needed to rent, and we needed to rent bikes, which meant that we needed to locate a bike rental shop near a trail. Shark Valley Trams is located at the Shark Valley Visitor Center in the park. They have daily bike rentals for $20 per bike and are right next to a 15 mile trail – so that felt like a no-brainer to us. We arrived early in the afternoon on a weekday and there were plenty of bikes available. It turns out that not many people want to ride bikes 15 miles with no shade in the middle of summer in Florida… I can’t imagine why. The loop is perfectly flat, which is good because the bikes don’t have gears.
We stopped on the side of the path to walk down Otter Cave Hammock Trail. A quick read of the sign by the trail informed us that there really aren’t otters living in these holes in the ground – bummer. These holes foster important life and they form over time as the porous rock wears away from acid rain and groundwater.
At the halfway point in the trail loop, we stopped to climb the observation tower. It was a great place to stop in the shade, drink some water, reapply sunscreen, and enjoy the view.
The heat is sweltering and it is so sunny on the trail – we were happy that we brought more water than we needed. Some of the bikes had baskets, so we put our backpacks and tons of water in them. Also, the Visitors Center has water, which they sell in the slowest vending machine I’ve ever tried to use.
There is a creek that runs right next to the trail for the first half of the loop, which makes watching alligators and turtles so easy as we pedaled along. I’m not particularly good at identifying various types of birds, but the number and diversity was really impressive. It seems like they are so accustomed to people, they just stood there right in the path and watched us ride by. It made me wish I had a bird book, some binoculars, and a couple extra hours to just watch them from the observation tower.
