Can anyone check over my trip and see if I'm missing anything?

[Tony L]

Three of us are planning on doing the trip from Flamingo to EC this March and have some planned routes that I hope I can bounce off all of you. We've been from EC to Darwins and from Hog key back on the northern end, and from Flamingo to East Cape on the southern end, but this will be our first trip through the middle rivers area.  I feel pretty confident on my map reading skills. Obviously the sites will depend on availability, but we will be reserving on a Thursday before most of the country has spring break (March 8).

Option 1:

Day 1 - Flamingo to Hells bay chickee via the canoe trail - 6 mi

Day 2 - HBC to N river chickee - 11 mi

Day 3 - N river chickee to Shark river chickee - 9 mi

Day 4 - Shark river chickee to Harney river chickee - 10 mi

Day 5 - Harney river chickee to Highland beach via the nightmare route, but coming out to the Gulf near Broad creek because low tide will be at 1:30 - 12 mi

Day 6 - Highland beach to rogers river chickee - 12 mi

Day 7 - Rogers river to plate creek chickee - 10 mi

Day 8 - Plate creek to Mormon Key - 14 mi (with an outgoing tide till 5pm)

Day 9 - Mormon key to Pavilion key - 4.5 mi

Day 10 - Pavilion to Chokoloskee - 13 mi

 

The other people in our group like this path because they want to see the small creeks and rivers of the interior everglades, but ultimately I will probably be the one responsible for navigation. The other option is to take the Joe river and eventually get to the Harney river chickee. 

What do you think? 

[Terry]

Good, south to north is correct and Hells Bay Trail is the correct place to start at the

south end.  Big NO to Joe River unless you're doing the WW by powerboat.

Shark River and Harney River Chickees will have no-see-ums, so you can fix that

by including an original WW campground on Day 3:

Day 2 - Watson River Chickee

Day 3 - Canepatch (via Labyrinth of course, I did not look at the tides, you need to ride the tide up Shark)

           Also, you have no ground sites, only beach and chickees, Canepatch is the best of all the

            backcountry sites.

Day 4 - Highland Beach ( Take the north route out of Canepatch and, yes, the Nightmare is a must.)

Day 8 - Did they say small creeks?  How could anyone go between Plate Creek Chickee and

            Mormon Key without using Charlie Creek?!?!

Day 9 - Mormon to Picnic or Tiger Key

Day 10 - Exit at Collier Seminole State Park

[Tony L]

Thanks for the reply!

Maybe we will check out canepatch. Low tide in Whitewater bay is around noon, so we can make our way towards shark river and wait until the tide turns.  We've only done Lopez river and Grocery place as ground sites in the past (10 years ago) so I intentionally kept ground sites off my list - we had rats crawling through our campsite all night at lopez and it looked like nobody used grocery place (the west side) in years so it was all grown over. Canepatch looks like a much nicer site though.  

I didn't know about Charlie creek until I started looking at other posts here.  We've done part of Gopher Creek, but on all the maps and books it says it's unpassable - Now I know better. 

 

Thanks