Ground Sites

I imagine what I'm going to say won't be popular but I'm going to say it anyway. When I go out in the woods I enjoy being in the "wild". But there are places where I enjoy being where people have lived and traveled for centuries if not 1,000's of years. To sit among tent rings in the far north 100's of miles from another human, a spot to us too harsh to imagine, that was in the past peoples' beloved home, to use a portage trail that has been worn down by fellow canoeists for eons, to sleep on a ground site that was built by centuries of Glades people living with their environment as comfortably as their techniques and technology would allow is a special joy to me.

I feel the people of the past are laughing at us when we set up in the Glades at a ground site and we depend on the luxury of noseeum netting or chemicals for it to be enjoyable where as they would have at least opened up the site. Granted I figure they would love noseeum netting and bug spray but I also feel they would think "What a waste, we spend years building up a pleasant ground site and now the moderns let it overgrow and become buggy"

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Permalink Reply by Flex Kayakfari.com on January 13, 2013 at 4:54pm

Rob, the Park Service sets the policies on human access and usage of Park lands - c'est la vie! For sure there's a lot of human history in the Everglades, but it's not widely known to most people, and the Park doesn't really go out of it's way to educate people about it.. also keep in mind that most backcountry visitors / campers generally prefer the chickee platforms anyway!

I think a big part of what this EEN site is about is re-discovering (semi-recently) lost paths and trails, while operating within the Park regulations. I don't think we will ever see much expansion of the number of ground sites (although there are many possible places), however the paths connecting some of them can be explored as several folks on this site have taken on the challenge(s) of doing so.