Outdoor sights in Everglades National Park

1. Loop Rd

   • Everglades National Park, USA
   • Sights › Outdoors

   A little further up you can detour down Loop Rd , which offers four interesting sites. One: gambling-enriched Miccosukee (this is still their reservation), whose houses all seem to have shiny new pick-up trucks parked out front. Two: great pull-offs for viewing flooded forests, where egrets that look like pterodactyls perch in the trees. Three: scary, isolated Florida types who make it very clear trespassers will be sorry.

   And four: the short, pleasantly jungly Tree Snail Hammock Nature Trail. Be warned that the Loop is a rough, unpaved road.

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2. Tamiami Trail

   • Everglades National Park, USA
   • Sights › Outdoors

   Calle Ocho happens to be the eastern end of the Tamiami Trail, which cuts through the Everglades to the Gulf of Mexico. So go west, young traveler, along US 41, a few dozen miles and several different worlds away from the city where the heat is on.

   Past Hialeah, Miami fades like a trail of diminishing Starbucks until…whoosh…it's all huddled forest and open fields and a big canal off to the side (evidence of US 41's diversion of the Glades' all-important sheet flow).

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3. West Lake Trail

   • Everglades National Park, USA
   • Sights › Outdoors

   Rte 9336 cuts through the soft heart of the park, past long fields of marsh prairie, white, skeletal forests of bald cypress and dark clumps of mahogany hammock. There are plenty of trails to detour down. The West Lake Trail runs through the largest protected mangrove forest in the Northern Hemisphere.

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4. Otter Cave

   • Everglades National Park, USA
   • Sights › Outdoors

   At the park entrance, the easy Otter Cave walk makes a boardwalk-ed loop through a thick copse of tropical hardwoods before emptying you out, disoriented, right back into the Shark Valley parking lot.

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