Flamingo grill near me how to#

That a significant part of the Everglades remains is due in large part to Douglas's activism. The ecosystem was not seen as something worth saving by the many developers who drained and ditched this region all through the 20th century.

A seminal work on South Florida's unique ecology, the book was published in 1947, the same year the Glades were designated a national park. In 2017, Hurricane Irma tore through the area, and the people who live there are still recovering.įinally, there's no better way to prepare for a journey to the park than to pick up a copy of The Everglades: River of Grass, by the late journalist and conservationist Marjory Stoneman Douglas. The Everglades City area was so lawless in the recent past that bales of cocaine and marijuana were alleged to have regularly washed up on the shore. Surrounding the park, especially its western parameters, are small, interesting towns like Everglades City, which some of the fabled Gladesmen-non-native people who managed to decipher the mysteries of the swamp and carve out frontier lives for themselves-still call home. What You Need to Know Before Visiting Everglades National Park

Flamingo grill near me how to#

Here's our guide to the Everglades on how to do just that. The Glades are also a premier dark-sky zone, a sanctuary for migratory birds and raptors, and a refuge to get absolutely lost and forget the modern world exists at all. Fragile and always changing, this Unesco World Heritage site is under threat of real inundation as sea levels rise, as well as from red tide and blue-green algae blooms (possibly caused by agricultural runoff), which have been devastating in recent years. Crocodiles and alligators, the Florida panther, manatees, and a vast number of flora, fauna, and invasive species of all sorts call the place home.

But the preserved Glades are as wild as it gets. Today the national park preserves just 20 percent of that, and cities, suburbs, and agricultural land abut its very edges. Now, after living on its doorstep for 20 years, I've become enthralled with its untamed nature.Ī catch-all term for many different ecosystems, the Everglades once stretched more than 200 miles, from the Kissimmee River in Orlando, south past Lake Okeechobee, to the state's southernmost tip and the Gulf of Mexico. Its 1.5 million mostly inaccessible acres make it the third-largest national park in the lower 48 after Death Valley and Yellowstone. Even today, this national park is massive. But there's a reason the Glades remained wild well after the continent had been 'conquered,' why the migrant Seminoles were able to hide so long in its redoubts from the U.S. Buggy, hot, and flat, what I laid eyes on then was a sodden grassland, and I wasn't much impressed. I first saw the Everglades more than 30 years ago, as a kid from Chicago dragged along by my parents. This article originally appeared on Outside