Rock Reef Pass elevation 3 feet

Monday 7 March 2011
The Everglades in March are not the soaking wetlands I expected. It is the dry season and there are certainly gator holes, ponds, and sloughs, but the majority of the park is covered by dried out saw grass about four feet high. BJ took lots of alligator, and water bird pictures at the Royal Palm Anhinga Trail. But the state bird of Florida should be the ubiquitous black vulture. BJ and I sat on a bench a few feet from two of these cheeky birds resting on the bank of a slough. It wasn't long before they started eyeing us in such a way that we decided we needed to "look alive."

The Everglades and all Florida are VERY flat. When the high point of the day was a pass all of three feet in elevation you might begin to picture how incredibly flat it really is. Most of Florida is a limestone table about one to four feet above sea level. But the stands of trees will fool you. Any place that can rise a few inches higher than the surrounding land becomes a tree colony. In one place it might be mostly tall pine trees. In another it might be bald cyprus, and in another it might be mahogany trees that dominate. During the rainy season the Everglades is covered by a sheet of slow moving water. Where the trees are clumped together soil builds up a few extra inches and a sort of island of trees is formed above the sheet of rainy season water. This island is called a hammock. The American Indians formerly lived on some of these hammocks and built their villages on some of them. There are hundreds of these elongated hammocks all pointing downstream from the very slow moving current. In some places they are separated by a few hundred yards, in other places by miles of saw grass plains that become a wetland water sheet in rainy season May to November.

We have come to camp at Flamingo about as far south as you can get on the mainland of Florida. It also happens to be the only place in the whole world where alligators and crocodiles live together. I haven't spotted any crocs yet. But from where I'm sitting I can see Florida Bay which separates the mainland from the Florida keys. Before today I thought the keys were a string of islands ending near Key West. I learned that any coastal island in Florida, including thousands on the Gulf Coast side of Florida are also called keys.