Visiting Everglades City is like stepping into the Florida of days gone by. Surrounded by Everglades National Park, the Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuge, Big Cypress National Preserve, the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge, Picayune Strand State Forest, Collier-Seminole State Park and the Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park, this is a small town on the edge of the Florida wilderness.

Everglades City and nearby Chokoloskee Island provide a glimpse into Southwest Florida’s past with several notable museums and quaint small town charm. Known as the Stone Crab Capital of the World, Everglades City’s numerous stone crab processing facilities provide ample supplies of this fresh Florida delicacy to restaurants in town and all along Florida’s coast during stone crab season each year from October 15 through May 15.

While still enjoying the slow pace of a rural village, Everglades City is undergoing something of a renaissance due to rapidly escalating real estate values. As waterfront property skyrockets in demand, the town’s small bungalows are being replaced by elegant multistory Florida Cracker-style homes overlooking the Barron River.

STONE CRAB AND SEAFOOD
Everglades City was a boomtown during construction of the Tamiami Trail highway at the turn of the century. In later years, residents turned to hunting and fishing to support their families. Hunting restrictions came with the establishment of Everglades National Park in 1947, and with the passage of a ban on gill net fishing in 1994 in Florida, many mullet fishermen turned their attention to stone crabbing or tourism related endeavors. Today Everglades City is known as the Stone Crab Capital of the World. Close to half a million pounds of stone crab claws are processed each season between October and May in Everglades City for shipment to other area, for use in local seafood restaurants and for the annual Everglades City Seafood Festival, held every year during the first weekend in February. Lunch and dinner are great reasons to visit Everglades City, with a number of popular seafood restaurants in town. Private pilots even fly in to Everglades Airpark, the town’s general aviation airport, to buy stone crab claws “to go” or to enjoy lunch at an area waterfront restaurant.

EVERGLADES NATIONAL PARK
Everglades National Park is the only subtropical preserve in North America and is part of the largest wetlands ecosystem in the United States. It contains both temperate and tropical plant communities, including sawgrass prairies, mangrove and cypress swamps, rare orchids, pinelands, and hardwood hammocks, as well as marine and estuarine environments. The park is known for its rich bird life, particularly large wading birds, such as the roseate spoonbill, wood stork, great blue heron and a variety of egrets. It is also the only place in the world where alligators and crocodiles exist side by side. Everglades National Park has been designated a World Heritage Site, an International Biosphere Reserve, and a Wetland of International Importance. The western gateway to Everglades National Park is the Gulf Coast Visitor Center in Everglades City. There is no charge to enter the visitor center’s education display area, and there is also no charge for embarkation via canoe or kayak from the center’s docks. Visitors can purchase tickets to hop aboard daily guided boat trips from Everglades National Park Boat Tours into the mangrove estuaries of the Ten Thousand Islands section of the park. These boat trips run approximately every half hour 9:00 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. The trip lasts one and a half hours.

One of the daytrips on the GPS-marked Paradise Coast Blueway paddling trail departs from the Gulf Coast Visitor Center heading to Sandfly Island. Paddlers should allow at least 3 to 4 hours for the trip, as the island, an ancient Native American shell mound, has a nice hiking trail. Canoe and kayak paddlers in search of adventure have many close encounters with wildlife including manatee, bottlenose dolphin and sea turtles, along with abundant bird life including bald eagles, osprey, roseate spoonbills, swallow tailed kite, Everglades snail kite, wood storks, brown pelicans, white pelicans and much more. Paddlers may obtain the required backcountry camping permits at the Gulf Coast Visitors Center to tackle the Wilderness Waterway, a 99-mile waterway route from Everglades City to Flamingo that is often considered to be the paddling trip of a lifetime. The entire trip takes seven to nine days for paddlers with no civilization along the route. The Wilderness Waterway may also be traversed by small motorboat, a popular adventure for fishermen. Phase 1 of the new Paradise Coast Blueway system of paddling trails provides GPS-marked trail routes from Everglades City to Goodland on Marco Island. www.paradisecoastblueway.com.

The park and its surrounding preserve areas provide some of the most unique and easily accessible opportunities for viewing rare flora and fauna in North America – it is home to 2,000 species of plants, many extremely rare, more than 200 species of birds and over 160 animal species. Along the outskirts of the national park, numerous private tour operators provide airboat and swamp buggy excursions through the sawgrass plains, swamps and hardwood hammocks that comprise the western Everglades ecosystem. Adjacent preserve lands provide ranger-led and self guided tour opportunities, including the Big Cypress National Preserve, the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge, Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuge, Collier-Seminole State Park and Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park, home to the epiphytic ghost orchid (made famous through Susan Orlean’s book The Orchid Thief) and many other rare plant species.