While we were down in southern Florida last month, we spent most of our time in Big Cypress National Preserve. We had not intended on staying there much, as we had originally gone down to explore the Everglades. Our intent was to stay a few nights in Big Cypress to base camp while we figured out just where we wanted to haul our 42′ toy hauler to camp for our Everglades adventures. Because of construction on the east end of 41 in Big Cypress, we decided to leave the RV in the Big Cypress Swamp preserve. Through the construction, there were multiple flaggers, and each flagger had multiple rumble strips, and down here, their rumble strips really rumble; we didn’t want to have to haul the RV through all that mess if we didn’t have to. In the end, we were so glad that we decided to stay in Big Cypress – we LOVED it. And while we enjoyed our day trips to the Everglades, Big Cypress Swamp is the one that really made an impression on us!
Big Cypress Swamp National Preserve is 790,000 acres that are set aside to protect the Everglades water shed. The preserve is not exactly the same as a National Park, but it is part of the National Park System. In Big Cypress, you can hunt and fish, and there are even some private residences.
The preserve has several different visitor’s centers that are musts to see. Each one is unique! The Welcoming Center on the west entrance to the preserve is where you sign up for swamp walks and canoe tours (call ahead if you can – they are usually full!), and it has a great boardwalk behind it where you can look out over the river, and hopefully get a peek at the manatees that are often seen swimming there. The Oasis Visitor’s Center, about half-way through the park on Highway 41, has (in my opinion) the best close-up gator viewing (I’d say guaranteed, but you are guaranteed to see gators in Big Cypress Swamp anyway – there are so many you couldn’t miss them if you tried!); there is also a great place to take a swamp walk, right across from the v.c. Both the Welcoming Center and Oasis play a short film to help familiarize visitors with the park. There is also the Shark Valley visitor’s center. Shark Valley is a little bit different in that there really isn’t a visitor’s center there – there is an information booth, and this is where you can take a tram ride along a canal, and view the gators and wading birds. The tram ride was a little out of our price range (everything is X12 for us!), but it looked fun! Even if you choose to skip the tram ride, the paved path that the tram drives on is a popular biking path, and many also walk it. We walked it for approximately half a mile, and in that little space we saw a ton of alligators, including a momma with about 12 babies! That was such a neat experience!!!
