Doing the Glades

It’s hard to grasp for us Northerners, being hot in January, but here we are, seventy degrees early in the morning, and the forecast calls for a high in the mid-eighties.  We’ll just have to make the best of it.

First stop this morning was Nine Mile Pond, a couple of ponds amongst the grassy marsh and mangrove islands that is popular with fishermen and paddlers.  Our intention was to paddle the canoe trail.  Not all nine miles of it, but taking the shortcut in the loop, making it about 3.5 miles.

The fishermen were out in force, but we encountered only one other person in a kayak, otherwise we had the trail to ourselves.

This was a fun trail.  The first half hour or so was spent navigating through small mangrove tunnels.  When the paddles are longer than the tunnel is wide, it makes paddling rather difficult.  But the tunnels eventually opened up into larger areas of water with clumps of mangroves scattered about, and some areas of marsh grassland where birds were busy looking for their next meal.

The trail was marked by numbered white poles.  We would have been completely lost without them as this is a rather large area where every direction looks the same, at least from a kayak.

There’s no current here, so you don’t move if you don’t paddle and for the first half of the trip, we were going against a stiff breeze, which helped keep us cool in the increasing heat, but took more energy to keep moving forward.

Pole number 44 marked the beginning of the shortcut.  Other poles marked the path of the shortcut, straight through a very shallow are with lots of decaying plant matter floating on the surface.  It was like paddling in a vast bowl of soup, so shallow at times that the kayaks were hitting the muddy bottom, requiring more effort just to keep moving.  Other times the water was a little more clear, and the wind, now behind us, would propel us along when we held our paddles in the air.

There was supposed to be some good wildlife viewing at a couple points along the trail, and if you were at the right time, a large crocodile has been sighted in these parts.  Alas, we did not encounter the croc, but we did see and hear quite a few birds.  And fish.  And turtles.  One large one was quite near to my kayak and I attempted to take his picture several times, from both above the water and below by sticking my phone in the water and taking a picture.  But none of them really turned out well.

The whole loop took us over two hours and we got back shortly before lunch.  We took a quick hike on a boardwalk trail to West Lake on the way to Flamingo, then made lunch in the visitor center parking lot at Flamingo, which is as far south in the Everglades and in Florida that you can drive without going to the keys.

After lunch we walked around the grounds for a while, sitting by the water’s edge and watching the manatees surface, and looking at a large osprey nest built right next to a canoe/kayak outfitter’s building. The activity didn’t seem to bother the osprey one bit.

Maybe it was the heat, maybe it was the effort expended this morning in the kayaks, probably some of both, but we were both feeling somewhat draggy, so we went back to the RV and took a nap.

We then decided to take a bike ride.  One brochure suggested a 12-mile loop consisting partly of the main park road, the Rowdy Bend Trail, and the Snake Bight Trail.  The road was easy enough, but the Rowdy Bend Trail is an unmaintained trail that allows bikes for some reason.  The trail is a narrow, overgrown mess that gets quite muddy in spots, and we were constantly hopping tree roots, getting slapped by branches, and walking the bikes through mud holes.  Not at all what we expected and the brochure didn’t say anything about this.  

It took quite a while to navigate the 2.6 miles of this trails and when we reached the Snake Bight trail, it seemed like a super highway even though it was only about a foot wide.  It was relatively smooth, straight, and the branches are kept cut back.  

For most of the trip back along the main road, the bike tires were flinging bits of mud up in the air.

On the way back to our campsite at Long Pine, we stopped at Mahogany Hammock, a stand of old growth mahogany trees that were missed when the rest of the area was logged for mahogany years ago.  It is a thick jungle of trees and understory that would be impossible to get through, were it not for the boardwalk trail we were on.

Last stop was Pahayokee Overlook, which has another boardwalk trail to an overlook where vast areas of grassland can be seen.  We got there just in time for the sunset which could be seen through the trees.

Back at the campsite, we had leftovers for dinner and watched our church service, recorded earlier today.  The 9am service was quite empty.  We weren't there and quite a few people stayed home because of seven inches of snow that fell yesterday.  And here we are trying to keep cool.