Today’s focus was Everglades National Park as I crossed from the Gulf coast to the Atlantic coast of Florida. The National Park has several separate entrances and visitor centers so I decided to visit two of them as I headed to Florida City on the road to the Keys.

According to the National Park website the Shark Valley area tram tour visits the heart of the Everglades and has the most variety of wildlife so I decided to make that my first stop of the day. Since the area is so delicate the Park Service uses the route of a road  constructed by oil prospectors  in the 1930s as a tram-way and allows a concessionaire to operate electric trams along the 15 mile round trip to an observation tower. You cannot book the tram tours online so I arrived there at 10:30 for the 11 o’clock tram tour but it was sold out. Since this was a “must-see” I decided to look around the visitor center and walk the short nature trails while waiting for the 1 o’clock tour.

I should have known that the tour was likely to disappoint when the very first thing the tout guide said was that it was their “off-season” so wildlife was difficult to see.  All the rain that has fallen in the south over recent months (which also caused me to delay this trip) means that the water level in the park is almost 3 feet higher than normal for this time of year and so the wildlife spreads out across the full area of the park instead of being concentrated in low-lying areas along the tram-way. We did see quite a few alligators and several birds but, for a two hour tour, the pickings were pretty sparse. Even at the observation tower where wildlife is normally spotted nobody could see any.

After Shark Valley my plan was to drive to Florida City where I would re-enter the park to drive the 60 mile round trip along the scenic road to the southern tip of Florida’s mainland at  Flamingo and back. However, due to the two hour wait for the tram ride, it was just after 4 PM when I would have literally driven past my hotel to begin this. The round trip takes over two hours with no stops and the traffic was heavy on this beautiful Sunday afternoon so, given the disappointment of Shark Valley, I decided to abandon that endeavor. After all, it’s not really on the perimeter since Key West is still almost 70 miles away.

The video and map that might clarify the above are here (Flamingo is not shown on the map but is more-or-less due north of Duck Key which is labeled when you zoom in a little).

The photos below show an egret and an alligator spotted from the tram. A view of the marsh that makes up most of the Everglades with areas of larger vegetation in places as seen from the observation tower.