Canoeing the Everglades’ Wilderness Waterway

Primitive and exceedingly complex, Everglades National Park continues to attract me with the promise of more than another routine and safe environmental outing.

The most satisfying way to explore the area, of course, is by canoe, a craft that has been used in the Everglades for hundreds of years. Canoes were what the pre-Columbian Calusa Indians used to fish and hunt amid the cyclic ebbs and flows of the Everglades’ fresh and tidal waters.

Today, the best of what the Everglades once was is protected in a 1.4-million-acre national park that sprawls over the southwestern tip of Florida. Buffer lands with related ecosystems extend almost seven times that area, helping to capture and feed upland water into the Everglades.

Our 120-mile trip took us through the heart of the park’s mangrove-fringed border on the Gulf of Mexico. Our route generally followed that of the “Wilderness Waterway,” winding north-south between Everglades City and Flamingo, an old fishing village now reclaimed as a ranger station and motel/marina at the tip of the Florida peninsula.

The waterway is marked every so often with signposts corresponding to their respective locations on nautical charts.

Ecologically, we were in a largely brackish water zone that supports an amazingly rich variety of aquatic life. We explored a primitive back country that other men have explored over hundreds of years, while leaving behind only bits and pieces of the things that sustained their lives: the overgrown midden mounds, the broken cisterns, the rusted cane syrup kettles.

Before the trip, our challenge was figuring out how to fit nine days of food and drinking water into one small canoe, and determining how to keep gear high and dry. It involved running a shakedown cruise loaded to the gunwales.

We would face strong currents, heavy winds, miles of unmarked trails and waters that we would share, at different times, with alligators and sharks. We would have to paddle an average of 13 miles a day.

But the biggest reality on this trip was that there was a lot of water but very little dry land on which to camp. As we packed up our gear and prepared to launch our canoe into the Turner River near Everglades City, that reality set in hard.

The morning was crisp and fresh and the sun was barely over the horizon as we slipped into the deep creek with the knowledge that we were the guide, the tour and the bus rolled into one small canoe.

There are no ranger stations in the back country. By the end of the day, we had to find our way to one specific campsite 18 miles away. If we took a wrong turn or paddled too slowly, we would end up spending the night tethered to a mangrove branch somewhere.

Our Turner River drop-off put us above the park boundary in a south-flowing freshwater creek that was narrow and crystal clear. The creek led us on a meandering trail of its own that was rimmed first with moss-covered oaks, then sawgrass, and which finally dead-ended in a thicket of red mangroves.

There we found a tunnel within the foliage and followed it, often pulling our way through the overhanging limbs to keep pace with the fast-moving creek. About halfway into the tunnel, a rooted wooden signpost--long robbed of its Park Service sign--was the only indication that we had entered the boundary of the national park.

Thick, pineapple-like bromeliads hung from the mangrove limbs and rich green ferns sprouted from the base of the roots along the tunnel, creating a primeval mood that we would discover again in other creeks and narrow backwaters.

Here and there, bright yellow rays penetrated the dense canopy, giving color to the bromeliads and affording a glimpse of the creek bottom.

By mid-morning, the tunnel opened into a river that grew broader as it turned south. After navigating some turns and river forks by compass, I was anxious to find a reference point that would place us squarely on the park map. Then we saw our first boat, a small motor skiff with three fishermen who had probably come up the Turner from Chokoloskee Bay on the Gulf.

I asked if we were near Hurdles Creek, the first marked river to intersect the Turner. It turned out that we were much farther than we thought, somewhere in the marshy mangrove bay called Hell’s Half Acre.

It was not much later that the river opened into a small bay, a modest three-foot-deep lake only half a mile wide. But it was the first broad stretch of water we had reached on the trip, and I was impressed by its size.

By noon we were well within the mangrove wilderness that would occupy most of the terrain for the rest of the journey. The thick, lush mangrove forests offer food and shelter to juvenile fish and shellfish, and play an intricate role in sustaining the habitats for larger gamefish such as tarpon, snook and reds, as well as for birds and mammals.

We saw large bottlenose dolphin cruising the inland bays and rivers, hunting under the hanging mangrove branches for food.

At midday, we entered the Lopez River against a strong current and paddled on south for several miles. An east wind from the Gulf and an increasingly brutal current made for slow going.

By 2 p.m. we found our first campsite: remains of a settler’s home that had been built on an Indian mound. The location’s giveaway was the presence of plants and trees associated with dry-land hammocks elsewhere in the Everglades, such as the red-barked gumbo limbo and the strangler fig, and imported foliage such as the flowering poinciana tree and the snake plant.

We pitched our tents at the Lopez River site, near the remnants of a concrete cistern that once provided water for settlers. We slept that night atop packed sand and oyster shells that had been used for this same purpose for hundreds of years.

The next morning we awoke to a day that was strangely gray and windy, ate a quick freeze-dried breakfast and broke camp early to get as much advantage as we could over a building wind.

As we shoved our canoe into the river and bore down against the tide, fish splashed circles in the water around us, and migratory ducks returned from their overnight roost on nearby Florida Bay to feed inland.

Noon brought a bright sun, burning off the mist and clouds and revealing the entrance to the first of three immense, shallow marine bays that funnel eventually into the Chatham River.

Oyster, Huston and Last Huston were two-mile-wide lagoons as large as practically anything that we would cross.

On this day, the sun was bright and warm and the waters were mirror flat. The paddle felt good cutting through the water. Ospreys hunted overhead and dolphins cruised the shoreline. It seemed a great time to be alive and in a canoe in the Everglades.

After paddling against a light breeze and the strong tidal currents of the Chatham, we landed at the Watson Place, one of the largest Indian mounds in the glades.

Watson is a 40-acre midden so high that it seems to be a natural bluff rather than anything man-made. Like most other islands and cays, it is named for an early pioneer--in this case a renegade sort named Ed Watson, who was killed in some long-forgotten feud by his neighbors in 1910.

Like the Lopez site, it has a couple of weathered picnic tables and iron grills, and its own small dock. Remnants of two cisterns, a cane syrup kettle and a brick furnace remain.

The next day we rose at dawn and headed for Lostman’s Five, a much smaller shell mound where, right after sundown, a canoe-size alligator dragged itself from the water and slid through the camp between our tents.

Later there were nights at the mound of Camp Lonesome, the chickee dock on the Harney River, and on the high, breezy shell bluff at Graveyard Creek overlooking the Gulf of Mexico.

The days were full of waterways with names like Squaw Creek, Cabbage Bay and Nightmare. There was a strong sense of the unseen, a sense to test survival skills as well as more aesthetic perceptions. There were rain and warm winter sun, calm waters and tide eddies strong enough to whip our craft sideways.

There were wild orchids and Gulf mullet that leaped into the canoe. There were visions that revealed some of the tropical beauty and natural mystery and unknown history. But only some. It is nature’s way.

Winter months (December to early April) are the only good time to visit the Everglades. Heat, rains and saltwater mosquitoes make summer unbearable.

We brought our own canoe to the outskirts of the Everglades, where we hired a local canoe outfitter to pick us--and the canoe--up at a prearranged time after our excursion. We were taken back to our truck at the beginning of the trip near Everglades City. The outfitter, North American Canoe Tours, also rents canoes at the rate of $18 for the first day and $15 for each additional day.

Shuttle services are $125, whether you bring your canoe or use theirs, and they include valuable interpretation of the three maps needed for the trip. This input is crucial, as they can help you figure alternate routes based on your interests and your skills, and help identify islands and creeks that may have gone unmapped.

North American Canoe Tours also has every item you should need for the trip available for rental, except for your sleeping bag. However, their food supplies are limited, so it’s best to bring your own. Plan carefully so you have at least six inches of “freeboard” after packing food, and three quarters of a gallon of water per person per day.

You must either camp on earthen Indian mounds, when available, or on the dock-like chickees since everything else is water and mud--even though the thick mangroves look firmly rooted in dry soil, from a distance.

NAC also runs guided canoe expeditions along this route with everything, including food, supplied starting at $550. For more information, contact NAC, Everglades City, Fla. 33929, (813) 695-4656 in-season, (203) 739-0791 in the summer.

The only charge from the park service is for a nominal entry fee. There are no camping fees, but you must reserve the campsites along your route, and no more than 24 hours ahead of time. Which means you have to wait until you get there to do so.

The park service also provides free maps showing local ecosystems in the Everglades and several other waterway routes, and has a list of campsites and other Wilderness Waterway details.

For more information, contact Everglades National Park, P.O. Box 279, Homestead, Fla. 33030, (305) 247-6211. In addition to the Waterway, there are five other canoe trails, from 2.5 to 24 miles in length.

The maps needed for the Waterway are NOAA charts 11430, 11432 and 11433, available from a good map store anywhere or at park concessions at both ends of the trail.