Big Cypress

Just to the north of Everglade's National Park is Big Cypress National Preserve. On Tuesday we briefly headed into one of the two northern most visitor centers in Everglades, the Gulf Coast Visitor Center, and learned a little about Big Cypress and were told to stop in at their Swamp Welcome Center (the red arrow on the map).

At the visitor center we learned about the Florida panther. The used to be fairly common all along the east coast. Now, their range has been greatly shrunk to only small parts of Southern Florida and they are incredible rare. Each panther has a home range of a few hundred square kilometers. This makes it tricky to protect them, as they're bound to cross roads and stumble upon ranches.

Even though we had sworn off gravel roads we ended up driving 20 miles up a gravel road to the Bear Island Camp ground, in the area that is in the purple box to the North of the map. This camp ground was the most remote of the camping choices and we were told that if we were going to see panthers anywhere in the park it would be up in that region. We were so glad that we went up there, it was well worth the drive. Unfortunately we didn't spot any panthers.

We decided to spend two nights up at this camp ground so that we could explore the area a bit. There were a lot of off road vehicle trails in the area, so for our full day we went took our bikes out for a long loop on the trails. It was a beautiful ride, in which we saw lots of wildlife, especially birds.

 

One of the most fun things about Big Cypress what the fact that there were alligators everywhere! They were sitting right next to the road on the way in, including right outside of the visitor center. We'll discuss alligators and crocodiles more in our Everglades post!