At Shark Valley, I took a rental bike and set off in the direction of an observation tower. The path led across a watery prairie feathered with saw grass. It was late in the day, and I was alone. Great blue herons watched me from behind banks of water lilies. Dragonflies balanced on the tips of the grass. A nightjar passed, flying low with its mouth open for insects. Not far from the path, on a raised island of trees, a dozen turkey vultures had gathered: a malevolent welcoming committee, folding and unfolding their wings, hopping from perch to perch.

From the top of the observation tower I looked out over a vast sea of grass, rippling with waves of wind, broken here and there by cypresses. Everglades National Park is like no place I have ever seen. This could have been the world after the Flood, narrow tongues of land only just emerging as the waters retreated. It seemed a world half-made, a place of base elements—land, water, and sky—arranged in sweeping horizontal bands. 

But the simplicity is deceptive. The Everglades are a complex natural world, and one of the most biodiverse habitats in North America. Occupying a great swath of southern Florida, the park teems with life in strange and sophisticated forms—plants that absorb nutrients from the air; trees that grow knee-deep in water; antediluvian alligators weighing up to a thousand pounds; elusive panthers that stalk, ghostlike, through the night; marine mammals once mistaken for mermaids; fish that walk on land.

The Everglades have not always been a national treasure, a place of family adventures and happy campers. When the Spanish arrived in southern Florida in the 16th century, they found several Native American tribes, among them the Calusa, who had been established in the area for thousands of years. By the 18th century, an Indigenous population of more than 20,000 had been reduced to a few hundred by European aggression, settlement, and disease. 

In those days the Everglades were seen as Florida’s ghastly backyard, a region of fearsome reptiles and unsavory characters. In the mid 1800s, the first government report on the Everglades didn’t sugarcoat it: “Suitable only for the haunt of noxious vermin, or the resort of pestilential reptiles,” the inspectors intoned. By the end of the 19th century, when America’s western frontier was largely settled, this was America’s last wilderness: difficult, intractable, dangerous. Well into the 20th century, there was a cry to “drain the swamp” so that this wasteland could be included in the development of southern Florida. 

But in 1947, President Harry Truman signed Everglades National Park into existence, quoting Psalm 23, “He leadeth me beside still waters. He restoreth my soul.” Today the greater Everglades ecosystem, which covers an area about the size of Connecticut, is prized as the largest subtropical wilderness in the United States. The national park is the third largest in the Lower 48, behind only Death Valley and Yellowstone. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site, an International Biosphere Reserve, and a Wetland of International Importance. Around a million people visit each year. The clamor to drain this swamp has been silenced; Americans have begun to see the Everglades as the country’s very own Garden of Eden. 

I headed west on the Tamiami Trail, the original highway between Miami and Tampa. I wanted to visit Everglades City, which is close to the Ten Thousand Island archipelago, off the western coast of Florida. It was late March, and temperatures were in the mid 70s. This was the dry season, which runs from December to April: the best time to visit, before the arrival of mosquitoes and uncomfortable heat. 

The highway passed the kind of roadside attractions that have been bringing tourists to the Everglades for decades—an alligator farm, swamp tours, and airboats, those deafening vessels skimming across the marshes that are an icon of the Everglades. Banks of clouds scudded away across the grasslands toward the Gulf of Mexico. Farther west, the businesses fell away and the two-lane blacktop ran like a ruled line all the way to the horizon. I began to feel the immensity of the place. 

The Everglades are the result of an unusual and inefficient drainage system. The waters of Florida’s Kissimmee River flow into Lake Okeechobee, the largest lake in the South and one of the largest in America. Okeechobee is a vast, shallow bowl, much of it barely 12 feet deep and with no natural outlet. In the past its waters simply rose over the low lip of the lake in a vast sheet and began to seep slowly southward across the flatlands of southern Florida. It is this sluggish flow that created the Everglades’ singular ecosystem. 

The early 20th century saw the introduction of dams, dredging, canals, and floodgates to divert and drain the waters of the Everglades. The construction of the Tamiami Trail in the 1920s blocked the water’s flow. A federal-state partnership, called the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, is undoing much of this ill-advised intervention and restoring the natural order of things, while still providing drinking water for 9 million Floridians. 

In Everglades City, I parked on a quiet street bordered by manicured lawns. In the 1920s and 30s, this was a busy stop on the Gulf Coast. It had a train station, a hospital, a sawmill, a laundry, a bank—the Bank of the Everglades—and the only streetcar south of Tampa. But as development gradually ebbed away to Naples and other parts of the state, the population dwindled. Today the old town seems to have retreated into a kind of sleepy Norman Rockwell innocence: the distant drone of a lawn mower, the call of kids playing catch, the smoky aromas of a barbecue. Sportfishing boats are moored along the Barron River, and tour boats set off on excursions through the Ten Thousand Islands each morning. These days, Everglades City isn’t much of a city: the 2020 census recorded a population of 352. 

Opposite the old Everglades bank is the Rod & Gun Club, which grew out of an 1890s trading post. The place is a juicy slice of Americana with its dark wooden furniture and floors, tasseled lampshades, wicker chairs on a screened porch, antique cash register, and a bar lined with stuffed bobcats and mounted deer heads. When I checked in I saw a huge alligator head, mouth agape, presiding over reception. One of the most characterful places to stay in South Florida, the Rod & Gun has hosted five presidents and a list of celebrities that runs the gamut from John Wayne to Mick Jagger. 

Back in the car, I followed the road through Everglades City and across a long causeway to the village of Chokoloskee, which sits on a mound of sand and shells left by the Calusa people. Standing on the shore is the Smallwood Store, a trading post opened in 1906. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, it is now a private museum. Raised on stilts to guard against rogue tides and hurricanes, it sold everything required for pioneer life in these parts. Along the solid wood counters I browsed blacksmith’s tools, boxes of buttons, rolls of fabric, old-fashioned crockery, cooking pots the size of washtubs, washtubs the size of bathtubs, tall barrels of nails, film magazines of the 1920s, Native American weaving, black-and-white postcards, and old medicine bottles. Stepping outside onto the rickety balcony, I found a pelican perched on the railing, eyeing the channel for fish. 

In 1910, when the only access to Chokoloskee was by boat, it was the scene of a mob killing. Among the many outcasts seeking their fortune in this remote part of the pioneer Everglades was Edgar Watson, a sugar planter, alligator hunter, and alleged serial killer. Wherever he went, Watson left a trail of suspicious deaths behind him. In Chokoloskee, his neighbors decided they had had enough. One evening, vigilantes lay in wait for him at the landing stage of the Smallwood Store. It was dusk when Watson came up the channel in his small boat. He docked and stepped ashore. When he refused to put down his gun, the mob opened fire. No one was ever convicted. 

Heading east again, I turned onto a backcountry trail called Loop Road and drove its 25 miles of gravel without seeing another soul. Close on either side were eerie woods flooded with shallow swamp water, the trees’ shaggy trunks festooned with air plants and the occasional ghost orchid. When I stopped to gaze into the dark pools around the feet of the trees, I saw alligator eyes breaking the surface, gazing back at me. 

I drove back east toward Miami and then down to the southern entrance of Everglades National Park, just outside the town of Homestead. Inside the gates the highway heads onward, free of roadside attractions, past signposted boardwalks like Royal Palm, where a keen-eyed passerby might glimpse more alligators, or a roseate spoonbill. Hiking trails like Pineland, Mahogany Hammock, and Pahayokee Overlook invite treks into watery woods draped in vines and shadows. The park also offers canoe trails like Hell’s Bay, where it’s possible to paddle through the mangroves into the backcountry to camp overnight on platforms known as chickees. I spent the night at Long Pine Key campsite, where I listened from my tent to the swamp opera—the hooting of barred owls, the trill of whippoorwills, the drone of cicadas. 

The park road ends at Flamingo, on the shores of island-strewn Florida Bay. A century ago, this was a rough-and-tumble place typically accessed by boat from the Keys. Its residents were the usual suspects—moonshiners, prohibition runners, alligator skinners, and plume hunters, who, at the beginning of the 20th century, were slowly decimating the bird population to support the fashion for exotic feathers in women’s hats. Nobody bothered giving the place a name until the opening of a post office necessitated one. The settlers considered calling it the End of the World. Instead they opted for Flamingo, for the birds that lived there in the spring and summer. 

The old town has gradually disappeared, replaced by a collection of handsome park buildings that include a visitors’ center, a grocery and tackle store, and the park’s authorized concessionaire, Flamingo Adventures, which runs a restaurant, a lodge, and a splendid tented camp and offers boat rentals and tours. The visitors’ center is named for Guy Bradley, a hero of the Everglades. A plume hunter turned conservationist, he was murdered in 1905 by his former hunting colleagues—another Everglades crime that no one was ever held accountable for. 

I had driven to Flamingo to rent a houseboat and explore Whitewater Bay, a large inlet of the Gulf of Mexico. The houseboat was not perhaps the most elegant of vessels—basically a box on pontoons—but its shallow draft made it ideally suited to conditions out on the bay. There were fore and aft decks, a couple of bedrooms, a bathroom, a galley kitchen, and the heady promise of being captain of my own boat. 

After the momentary distraction of watching a pair of ospreys carry fish to their nest of squawking chicks, then a sighting of manatees floating across the harbor, I climbed aboard with several bags of groceries and a growing anxiety about my nautical competence. Captain Nick Segwick piloted me through the Buttonwood Canal to Whitewater Bay. A white-bearded fellow who lives on a catamaran among the islands of Florida Bay, Segwick was a delightful echo of the old Everglades—a refugee from the world of urban modernity, savoring a simpler life. Between pointing out the tricolored herons along the banks as if they were personal friends, he mused on life in the Everglades. “There is a feeling of freedom down here,” he said. “That’s what I love.” And with that he wished me good luck and stepped onto a motor launch back to Flamingo. 

I spent the next two days on Whitewater Bay, navigating among the low mangrove islands, anchoring in inlets at night. There was no one else out there, bar the occasional distant fishing boat. Sky and water seemed to merge. The reflections of clouds drifted across the polished surface of the lake between the islands. Bottlenose dolphins appeared, swimming alongside the boat for a while, so close I could have reached down and stroked them. 

Above all, Whitewater Bay was defined by its vast congregations of birds. White terns swept elegantly back and forth, diving suddenly on sprays of bait. Black skimmers swooped low over their own reflections. Pelicans bombed into the water like boys at a public swimming pool. Cormorants perched on dead branches, spreading their wings to dry. Stalking the shorelines were herons, curve-billed ibises, sandpipers, and whimbrels. My favorite was a beautiful roseate spoonbill tiptoeing across a mudflat, its bill like a spatula, its body flushed pink. Above me, the abiding image of the Everglades: birds of prey cutting dark calligraphic figures in limitless skies. There were hawks and turkey vultures, their wing tips like fingers, and bald eagles, turning in wide circles with barely a beat of their wings. 

At sunset, the bay became stained with color until darkness gradually advanced across the water. A dense canvas of stars spanned the horizon. If you peered into the water, you could see them there, trembling on its surface. A universe of constellations, come down to meet America’s last great watery wilderness. 

How to Book

Flamingo Adventures: The park’s authorized concessionaire operates the Flamingo Lodge & Restaurant and a set of glamping tents, as well as houseboats and campsites. It also rents bikes, canoes, and kayaks.

Ranger-Led Programs: Guided hikes, swamp walks, and kayak trips are offered daily throughout the national park.

A version of this story first appeared in the April 2025 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “Wet ‘N’ Wild”