04.05.08 Florida Trail, Big Cypress - Dan was almost gator bait

Our first hike is going to be in Big Cypress National Preserve. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it I’ll give you a little info. First of all, when I say Everglades in this blog you can take it to mean any or all of the state and national parks/preserves/management areas that are part of the giant "swamp" of South Florida. These include the aforementioned Big Cypress and Everglades National Park, Fakahatchee Preserve, Picayune Strand, Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge and there may be one or two more that I can’t remember just now.
Big cypress is mostly North of Everglades National Park, between Collier County on the west and the Miccosuki Indian Reservation on the east. It straddles I75 also known as Alligator Alley. It is 2400 square miles of absolutely gorgeous subtropical forests and marsh prairie along with lush green pine forest and waterlogged cypress forest.

Yeah so at 4:50 am I rolled my tired butt out of bed, scarfed down some breakfast and sort of fell into my jeep and rolled off toward I75. I wanted to be at the rest area/Big Cypress access gate at mile marker 63 by dawn. The first misty rays of light were slanting through the cypress trunks as I dawned my camo gear and took up my camera. For those of you who are interested, I used a Canon 30D body with a 70-200 mm USM lens with a 2x extender for most of the shots today. It was not the usual forest quiet as the cars whizzed past me the noise carried well into the forest, in fact, I know I penetrated almost 2 miles into the forest during the day but never really escaped the sound of the highway in the background.
I had picked a spot to hike out to last night on Google Earth (that program is freakin’ amazing) and it was about 1.08 miles into the forest and east of the path. As I entered the beat up chain-link gate I saw a sign that said “Florida Trail”. I put a waypoint in my gps and started off at a good pace. I didn’t see much except a crane and a big old hawk in the distance that may have been an eagle.

At what I judged to be about a mile up the trail I decided to check my gps and see if I was nearing the point where I would turn off the path when I realized I had screwed up. I somehow didn’t press the save button on my first waypoint and so I had lost it. That would mean I had no reference point to judge the distance I had traveled so far. “Hmmn” I said, “Dan you’re a Dumb-butt.” But then I remembered I had printed out the Google earth picture of the area. I looked at it and sure enough I could judge my position by the twists and turns the path had made and I located myself. I had also put a distance indicator on the google picture last night just for good measure and I realized that I had already passed my 1.08 proposed turn off point. I was approx. 1.5 miles in. I noticed a path up ahead leading off to the east with a sign that read “Cocoa Piggy” and decided that this was as good a place as any to leave the trail. So put another waypoint in, then checked it to make sure it was in there and called my lovely fiancé to let her have the coordinates of where I was leaving the path. This was my back-up in case I broke a leg or what not. We agreed that I would call her at work (she’s an ER nurse) later but I knew she would call me continuously all day. (she did, like, 4 times)

So the plan was to find a spot and hunker down and wait for the animals to come to me. Mean- while I would try to avoid being shot by hunters because this was the second to last day of Turkey hunting season. They would all be out this weekend to get their last hunting in before next fall.
After about twenty minutes of walking through tall grass interspersed with palmetto bushes and pine trees I came to a line of tall dark cypress. Every time I see cypress trees it reminds me of the Okefenokee and that movie where the National Guard guys were lost in the Louisianna swamps and they all got murdered by the French speaking Cajun swamp people.
The ground started getting muddy and I noticed a lot of pig tracks running back and forth. The closer I got to the cypress the wetter the ground became until I was slogging through about six inches of water. I kept going and finally came to a very large grassy clearing, this would be perfect. It had cypress forest to the north, west, and south and palmettos and palm trees to the east. The sun was shining in my eyes and obscuring my vision. I reasoned that if I were a deer or some other animal and I wanted to go out on this prairie I would want to stay close to the trees and out of direct sunlight until I was sure the coast was clear and then stay near the edge just in case I needed to duck back in. So if I picked a spot on the east side by the palmettos, kind of toward the southern end of the clearing then I would be more apt to see something coming out of the dark line of trees to the south. I sat myself down at the base of a palm tree and waited…..and waited….and waited some more until finally I started getting antsy. I’m thinking, “This was a dumb idea Dan, this is, for some reason, probably like the last place these animals want to go, you somehow found the butt hole of the forest that none of the animals want to go to. I decided to try another place. BAD FREAKIN’ IDEA!!! As soon as I moved from my spot a big old buck turned tail and ran back into very line of trees that I reasoned he would come from!!! “You knucklehead!!” If I had waited another couple of minutes for him to ease his way out where I could see him I would have had a great shot of a majestic buck. “Damn!”

wild pig footprint

Ok, so I learned something, trust my instincts and be more patient. I went into the line of trees to investigate but he was gone. I walked around in there a while and came upon a line of tracks going back and forth. Both deer and pigs and some I couldn’t identify. So I hung around this little animal highway and waited. I noticed some of these cypress trees go up a ways the start twisting into like a corkscrew shape. I thought that if I could get up there it might not be a bad place to sit. You are not allowed to place tree stands but I wondered if I got pole climbing spikes like the telephone guys have, I could climb right up these biotches and sit up there where the deer won’t look for me. How cool would that be? Mental note to self: Check out the pole climbing spike idea later.

Ok so I didn’t see any more animals, I tried a few different spots then decided to head back. The walk back was pleasant but uneventful until I got almost all the way back to my truck, then things started getting interesting.
Along the west side of the path back to the gate is a thin canal, maybe twenty-five feet across at the most. I stopped here and there to shoot pics of birds and small gators which all took off as soon as they saw me. Then about maybe a quarter mile from the gate I came upon one of the biggest alligators I have ever seen. He was ten or eleven feet long if he was an inch. He was sleeping peacefully across the canal only about thirty feet from where I was standing. After a small gasp at the size of him I began clicking away with my camera.
Then, to my surprise and consternation he picked up his head and opened his eye and looked directly at me. He then launched himself (with speed that belied his huge bulk) into the water and began swimming across the top of the canal towards me. Now I am not the skittish type and had he been a little bit smaller I probably would have laughed at him. But this guy came straight at me and the look in his eyes and the predatory sway of his body told a chilling tale of my fate if he got a hold of one of my legs. He was easily big enough to drag me back into that canal, (and yes I saw that National Geographic special where the croc drags the animal under and spins himself around to drown it) so when he started moving in my direction I took one more shot and let him have the peace and quite an old gator deserves. I figured discretion was the better part of valor. You’ll notice the last picture of him is kind of blurry…..yup that’s ‘cause Dan was moving the other way as he took it. :0 That was the first time a gator ever bestirred himself from his muddy bank to come after me. Truthfully, it was a little scary.

Gator dreaming peacefully of nice raw meat.





OK, extremeley large, dreaming gator.



Gator's nap is interrupted by thoughtless man making clicking noises, his eye opens slightly.




He begins to notice how yummy the thoughtless man looks as his snout lifts out of the water a little.


Hmmn, " What large teeth you have" said Little Red Riding Hood.



"The better to latch on to you, drag you down and eat you with." Said the giant gator. ......
Ah, yeah, time to go I think.


The day’s fun wasn’t quite over yet , I decided to do some driving around on some of the roads out there in Big Cypress and came upon a flock of buzzards gorging themselves on a dead, bloated pig. Man, you never know what you will run into out here. I had no idea how, when or why the pig met his demise or why the gators didn’t get him first but the buzzards were enjoying themselves.








So that’s hike number one, hope you found it interesting, I did. Just from the pictures I took today you can see the beauty, the danger and the gritty edge of death that are the hallmarks of Mother Nature. This place has it all and when I go home to the safety and cool quiet of my house , there is a part of me that wants to stay out there in the Everglades.