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I was talking to some friends a couple of weeks ago and discovered they had done some backcountry canoe camping in the Everglades last winter. I didn't even know that there was backcountry camping in the Everglades. I came home that evening and decided to look it up. All of the information I needed to make an interactive map of the park was there, so I decided to add it. Along the way I discovered nearby Biscayne National Park has some good paddling routes as well, though there isn't any "real" backcountry camping. Here is the new map - Everglades and Biscayne National Parks The Everglades receives about 1,000,000 visitors per year, but only about 5,000 of those are backcountry campers. The best paddling is when all of the northern lakes are locked up in ice. (During the summer the bugs are too bad.) The premier backcountry route is the 99-mile Wilderness Waterway. The park has a great backcountry trip planning guide with a lot more information. The Everglades has three types of backcountry campsites - ground, beach, and chickee. The ground campsites are, well, sleeping on the ground. Beach campsites are, of course, camping on the beach. Chickees are pretty unique - they are platforms out in the middle of the ocean. I've had fun exploring the website and, since paddling season up here is winding up, dreaming of paddling down there during the winter. While using the interactive map on this site, I would encourage exploring the Everglades website since there is a lot of information I just can't fit on the maps here.
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Thanks. I did a overnight last year on a river up near Clearwater last year. Looking for something a little more remote. Any one done a multi-day trip in Florida?
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Wow. Call me a wimp, but the first thing I think about is alligators! I always feel a little spoiled living and camping in MN, where we don't really have to worry about predators. I'm sure there are safe ways to explore this wilderness too, but it is a bit intimidating! I would love to hear about the precautions people have to take in gator country...
Going to have to read up on this - Thanks Ben!
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Originally Posted by: eagle98mn  Wow. Call me a wimp, but the first thing I think about is alligators! I always feel a little spoiled living and camping in MN, where we don't really have to worry about predators. I'm sure there are safe ways to explore this wilderness too, but it is a bit intimidating! I would love to hear about the precautions people have to take in gator country... For me it is venemous snakes. The alligators might worry me a bit, but not as much as the snakes. That is why I can't live any further south than I do now. At the bottom of the pages on the Everglades site is a random "Did You Know?" fact. Several times I got to read the one that says something like "The Everglades has 28 species of snakes, and only four are venemous." Coming from an area with no venemous snakes, I was thinking, "What do you mean ONLY!!!"
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I did see some gaters on my trip down the Peace River. I would come around a corner and when they would see me they would launch themselves off the bank and into the river. The biggest I saw was about 6 foot. He made a big enough wake to make my little rented kayak bounce like a cork
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I thought about the snakes too, all those invasive pythons are pretty scary even without venom! I can't imagine being comfortable sitting around a campfire with my back to the wilderness out there.
As for alligator wakes big enough to rock my boat, you might have just scared me off permanently MagicPaddler. You can have the everglades to yourself!
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Originally Posted by: eagle98mn I thought about the snakes too, all those invasive pythons are pretty scary even without venom! I can't imagine being comfortable sitting around a campfire with my back to the wilderness out there.
As for alligator wakes big enough to rock my boat, you might have just scared me off permanently MagicPaddler. You can have the everglades to yourself! You can camp at a chickee out in the middle of the ocean - probably what I would do to avoid all of the snakes.
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Here's an interesting youtube video about the Everglades. I still think I'm most concerned about the alligators, but I did put this on my bucket list after watching...so I better get my courage up! The video includes those Chickees, which look pretty cool too.
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Shoot, that wasn't the video I intended, this one was the better one when I was looking around:
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