Everglades Exploration Network

A little more than three years ago, after Hurricane Wilma closed the backcountry of Everglades National Park for camping, I began planning a trip down the Shark River Slough from the Tamiami Trail down to Rookery Branch, and then on to Flamingo at Florida Bay.

Two years of drought, and some difficulty in building the boat I wanted to travel in, delayed the trip until early fall of this year. Finally, with a completed Glades skiff that had passed muster on the sawgrass and mangrove country in the south end of the Park, and blessed with a season of abundant rain that brought water levels up to nearly record highs, I set the starting date for the trip for Sunday morning of November 9 2008.

I will admit to a fairly high level of anxiety as the departure date approached, due to the lack of hard information I had regarding the conditions I would find in the Slough. When I say that I'd begun "planning" the Slough crossing, what I really mean is that I thought a lot about it, and over time I cobbled together what amounted to a very meager collection of information gathered from one book and a couple of online magazine articles, and I was plagued by a number of questions: Would the sawgrass be too high to get through before I got to the airboat trails? Would I be able to get through the mangroves at Rookery Branch? How would I get into the Slough in the first place? About two weeks before the trip a bit of serendipity came my way, and I received an email from someone who had just completed his own Slough crossing - in a single day! The exchange of information that followed (mostly one way, from Terry to me!) was a godsend. A good example was knowing how to enter the Slough, and one of the things that had me the most concerned was finding an entry point from the Tamiami Trail. The articles that I'd read, and the brief discussion I had with a couple of nameless Park Rangers at the Coe Visitors Center (who knew very little and couldn't even tell me what, if any, permit I would need), led me to believe that you had to get into the Slough a few miles east of Shark Valley from the disused section of the Tamiami Trail - the old "Dead Body Road" - that parallels US 41 east of the Forty Mile Bend. Terry had entered from the L-67 canal, which was a revelation to me. I'm not from south Florida and I don't know the area outside the Park very well, so this is something that would not have occurred to me.

The upshot of our discussions was that there was too little information available for folks who wanted to make such trips off the established Park trails, and no way for folks to get together to share what they knew. At first, we had thought about putting this information up on my other website, the Everglades Diary (if you don't know either Terry or myself, then you probably got here from the link on that site). However, just posting a few extra stories was not going to get the job done. What was really needed was a full-blown discussion forum, a way for others to easily discuss and share their knowledge and experiences. Now, I am not by any stretch of the imagination a programmer, and this is something that would take me much time to learn and to do correctly. To further complicate matters, I work a day job with overtime, and attend school nearly full time as well, and finding any spare time to update my website is already something of a sore point with me. The Everglades Diary has been a labor of love for me, but it is also a huge source of frustration in regard to finding time to actually work with it, and I didn't feel right adding even more content when I still haven't finished what I started four years ago. It's not the actual writing that is hard - I can pretty much write in my sleep - it's the grunt work of learning and writing all the code, and formatting the content so that it looks good and fits correctly. This is something I have to do every time I put together a new page, and, frankly, I don't always do it very well.

Then I found out about the Ning network and the tools they provide for networking people of similar interests. After about an hour of checking it out and seeing what it had to offer, it started looking to me like just what was needed to get our information out there and bring other Everglades explorers together to share their own stories and knowledge. A few minutes later, the Everglades Deep Exploration social network was born. What would have taken me hours and days to learn and to put in place from scratch was all ready to go with just a few mouse clicks.

The rest is up to you. Welcome, and please use this site to your advantage - that's what we're here for!

Views: 106

© 2024   Created by Keith W.   Powered by

Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service