Anhinga Trail
Easy
0.8 miflat~30 min
A paved and boardwalk loop over a slough with reliably close alligator, turtle, and wading-bird sightings. No permit.
Everglades · Mile 01 · The Story
A river fifty miles wide,
six inches deep.
Most rivers have banks you can point to. The Everglades doesn't work that way: water sheets slowly south from Lake Okeechobee across a nearly flat limestone shelf, spread so wide and so shallow that early surveyors didn't recognize it as a river at all. Marjory Stoneman Douglas gave it the name that stuck, calling it a river of grass, and the description is more literal than poetic. The whole ecosystem depends on that slow, wide, shallow flow, and decades of draining and diking for agriculture nearly broke it before restoration efforts began clawing pieces of it back.
What that flow supports is one of the largest concentrations of wading birds and alligators in North America, alongside the only place on Earth where alligators and crocodiles coexist. The dry season, roughly December through April, concentrates wildlife around the remaining water and makes it the best time to see almost everything the park is known for.
Come for the alligators sunning six feet from a boardwalk. Stay for the scale of a landscape that genuinely has no edge you can see. Read the story, trust the live data above for what is open today, and when you leave, mark it visited.
From $37.32
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