Florida Trail: Eastern Continental Trail Day 13-14
January 19 – 20, 2022
Mile: 41.1 to 61.2 (20.1 miles)
Start: Buffalo Tiger’s Airboat Tour, Miccosukee Reservation
Finish: TownePlace Suites Marriott, Kendall, FL via 136th Street
This morning we were going to wake up early and join up with Cookie, Tick Tock and their friend Cashmere to catch an Uber out to 25 or so miles up the trail and then hike back and catch a ride back to our hotel. We were supposed to leave at 7:15 but at 6:15 when I woke up, I had only gotten a couple hours of sleep for some reason and didn’t feel up to hiking an entire marathon only on 3 hours of sleep so I told Cookie that we weren’t gonna make it, to have fun and went back to sleep. We spent the day catching up on rest and I didn’t feel a little bit lazy but you know what it’s all good.
The following day we woke up early, ate some breakfast of eggs, this weird hotdog stuff and packed up our things to slackpack 20 miles back to the hotel. The hotdogs were so yummy in my opinion that I ate 3 helpings while Shannon’s face turned green – breakfast of champions!!! And slackpacking is when you hike with just a day pack leaving behind heavier items not needed like tents, sleeping bags and sleeping pads. We left the town around 9:30am and 30 minutes later we were in the boonies with our Uber driver and no cell phone service. The car drove over the canal which was so full of water that it rose all the way up almost to the highway. No wonder they were doing construction on the highway ripping up the swamp trees and sawgrass and adding gravel, cement pylons and bridges to combat the rising water levels.
We were dropped off at Buffalo Tiger’s Airboat Tours by a not too terribly interested Uber driver and headed south today back to our hotel since we are flip-flopping this section (aka hiking in the opposite direction). We didn’t think we’d be able to call an Uber to pick us up if we headed north and our assumption was proven correctly when we arrived at Buffalo Tiger’s on the Miccosukee Reservation and had zero cell service. However, we knew that we could call a rideshare service anywhere from the Kendall suburb of Miami and so we decided just to hike back south to that.
As we hit the canal, we encountered some very nice construction guys who asked us which way we were heading on our hike. There’s a big construction project out in the Everglades where part of the canals were now cut off by barbed wire fences and you had to call someone to open the construction gates. Thankfully we were going a different way but thanked the construction workers for his information.
As we headed down the canal, we walked past the ValuJet Flight 592 Memorial for the 110 people who were killed after a 1996 flight went down 10 minutes after departing Miami airport. The story about the accident was crazy. Apparently flight operations supervisors directed a contractor to load questionable luggage of oxygen generators into the cargo hold and cut corners on a few critical procedures in order to get the flight onto the ramp and up in the air. The cargo hold where the supposedly defunct oxygen generators unfortunately had no smoke detector because there was a fire suppression system that choked any flames from lack of oxygen. Unfortunately the “defunct” oxygen generators were jostled during taxiing, caught on fire and went undetected due to lack of fire alarms. Eventually smoke blew into the cabins causing the passengers to freak out and notify the crew. By the time the pilots found out, the plane steering failed and the plane blew up over the Everglades leaving no survivors. After the accident investigation drew conclusions of where the guilt and responsibility lay for the deaths of 110 people, one of the supervisors who was supposed to be tried in court fled the country and has been on the FBI’s Most Wanted List since 1996. It was a somber memorial to the accident and we respectfully walked through it.
This morning was about doing miles and we made good time until it started raining. Even in the rain we enjoyed ourselves, admiring the tough waterproof thatching on the roofs of the raised Miccosukee chickee houses in the villages. We spied the wide tire tracks of the swamp buggies which were essentially souped up trucks or jeeps that carried families over the swamp to hunt gators, Burmese python and deer. Purple pickerelweed flowers blossomed and showy orange, pink and yellow lantana blossoms waved in the breeze. At one point we looked down at the canal and found what we think is a very large snake skin shed from one of the freakishly large invasive pythons living in the swamp. It was sobering and made me want to be done with hiking before nightfall when the Burmese python supposedly preferred to hunt.
It was only forecasted to rain 0.1 inches so we stopped in at one of the dozen or so airboat tours in the area to grab some alligator meat for lunch and to wait out the storm. You could only reach Coopertown Restaurant over a slippery wooden bridge stretching across the black water gator-filled canal. The place was a little bit disheveled but served up some pretty decent food way out here in the swamplands.
We chowed on some grilled alligator salad outside on the benches while we chatted with four 20-something-year-olds about how they’re currently working in the service industry in the Florida Keys. A few had been guides in Montana leading rafting trips in Glacier National Park and a couple of them led river rafting trips down in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina. They even used to launch rafting tours under the bridge that ran right under the Appalachian Trail! Now they were working at a super fancy yacht club in Key Largo that caters to extremely high-end clientele. The yacht club had its own golf course, marina, beaches as well as its own private airstrip catering to some of the wealthiest people in the nation. Most of the people we talked to said that they didn’t give two shits about who the clients were. Some of the clients were just so wealthy it’s hard to even fathom their lives and at some point they all just blend together as old rich dudes. One of the more memorable clients was Jimmy John, the owner of Jimmy John’s sandwich restaurant chain that has a funny tagline known as the sub sandwiches being made “Freaky Fast.” When Mr. Jimmy John showed up to the Key Largo Yacht Club he had embroidered on every single boat seat “Freaky Fast” which I thought was hilarious. He also had a 200 foot yacht that was too big to go into the harbor so he had to take his million dollar 35 foot boat in to get to the shallow landing. What craziness!
A couple inside the Coopertown Restaurant were very nice and had offered for Shannon and me to sit in the same booth as them which is a large booth but we were pretty sweaty, rainy, stinky and didn’t want to subject these strangers to the Hiker Trash special. They both said they were vaccinated but had interesting shirts that said “Covidiot” and other stuff about Covid so I wasn’t entirely sure about being stuck with them. We just politely declined their offer and sat outside. The grilled gator salad was delicious and like a little bit firmer chicken. Our salads were washed down with french fries and Diet Coke before heading back onto the canal and into the rain again.
The sky in the distance was a dark blue and deep purple like a big fat bruise with thick walls of rain pouring in the not too far distance. We made good time down the trail once we turned off the busy Route 41 and onto the canals bordering some farmland on one side and the clear waters of the Everglades on the other. It’s nice because with the clear swamp water you could easily see whether you’re going to get eaten by alligators if you went down in the ditch to collect water. It’s the little things in life!
We only saw one gator beneath the water in the canal and hiked on, throwing our rain jackets on as the now black-and-blue skies decided they were going to open up and downpour on us. Whoever the weather forecasters are down here must not give a crap because the forecast said less than 0.1 inches of rain today. When we arrived back at the hotel we were completely drenched and had been walking through ankle deep water at points. Come to find out that over 2.6 inches of rain fell today which is just a wee bit more (aka 26 times) than what was forecasted.
We spent the afternoon walking along the elevated canal looking over at the clear freshwater that ran through the Everglades and flooded sawgrass prairie stretching as far as the eye could see. Yesterday we learned that the Everglades actually aren’t a big swamp but are actually a very slow moving sheet of water forming a wide river. The river covers 80,000 mi² and starts at 35 foot elevation pushing enormous amounts of water down to the sea level along the southern coastline of Florida. It was crazy to think that the seemingly stillwater we were seeing was actually slowly flowing on its way to the ocean.
There were so many birds out and besides turkey buzzards with their gorgeous multicolored wings and rooster red heads, we spotted white downy egrets, blue herons and onyx cormorants stretching their wings to dry. Ahingas dove under the water with ease and their sharp snakelike heads crested above the ebony water like a submarine periscope. At one point we even spotted the bright pink plumage of a roseate spoonbill flying away which many people mistake for flamingoes. It felt like there was so much wildlife here.
Soon the dark navy sky laden with heavy clouds opened up and it poured and poured all afternoon. Occasionally the rain would lighten up but we’re learning that Florida rain is a whole different kind of rain than anything we’d ever seen before. Everything was soaked through but Shannon had his waterproof backpack and I had my trash bag pack liner but everything important stayed dry. Up ahead on the trail we saw a massive turtle that I thought was a giant rock or coconut but it turned out to be a giant black basketball with legs, a head and a tail. I tried to sing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles song to the turtle but I forgot who all of the turtles were and Shannon said he probably wants to disown me now. You win some you lose some I guess and if our relationship ends over Ninja Turtles, it was a good run.
We passed some sort of evergreen forest that smelled like we were in a scented candle factory with wafts of fir and basil or oregano and something unnameable both spicy and sweet drifting over to us in the drizzle. Later we found out later the forest was composed of Sweet Bay trees that looked like giant conifers growing straight out of the water but smelled like heaven. My mouth started watering as the scent of bay leaves or cooking something good enveloped us in the warm rain, distracting our noses from how we both smelled of wet dog and acrid sweat. Let’s just say our Uber driver later that day made some comments about our smell.
We hadn’t quite made it to the end of our day before the sun started to set. As we still had a few miles left to go, we just hoped that the worst of the rain would hold off as the evening skies darkened. Rain and nighttime is not my favorite hiking weather but I couldn’t change it. We were maybe 1.5 miles from where we were going to catch an Uber to pick us up when the night became too dark to stumble our way through blindly and we had to take our headlights out. Shannon was being stubborn playing the so-called “Headlamp Game” where the last person to take out their flashlight while hiking in the dark wins. It’s a stupid game and usually ends with someone almost falling in the black night and nearly maiming themselves. Shannon was seriously betting on not taking out his headlamp and thought we could make it to the end of the trail using just the sparkle from the reflecting puddle water and the yellow haze of light pollution of Miami keeping us company. Well he sure changed his mind about taking his headlamp out when he almost stepped directly on a 2-foot-long venomous cottonmouth that had snaked his way onto the trail. There was some screaming involved and backpedaling down the trail but we both definitely took our headlamps out after the snake in the dark incident. One thing that warns the snakes you’re coming down the trail is the vibrations from your hiking poles and we made sure that our hiking poles were firmly touching down on the packed ground before us. It’s the little water moccasins or cottonmouths that are the worst ones to encounter because the baby snakes don’t have enough experience to know how much venom to inject when they bite you so they just release all of it, often delivering much more potent bites than adult snakes. Luckily for us, this cottonmouth felt our big clumsy steps and turned tail as we neared it, hurriedly snaking its way back into the grass where he came from and leaving us alone.
After a beautiful day in the rain we caught an Uber back to the hotel having stashed another 20 or so miles under our belt. By the time we arrived back at the hotel, we were both starting to shiver a little from the low temperatures despite our rain jackets having kept us dry the whole day. After a long hot shower, I sprung into the bed under a thick comforter with the heat turned all the way up to sauna level to stay warm. Dinner was some Thai food delivered to our hotel and bed was shortly after around 9pm. Tomorrow we’re supposed to go try an airboat ride which should be exciting since Shannon‘s never been on one before. We’re also probably a day or so behind Cookie and Tick Tock and all them which was fine – maybe we’d catch up with them up the trail. It was just exciting having met some other Florida trail hikers already on supposedly such a little traveled trail. I guess only 400 people have thru-hiked the Florida Trail before and after our hike is done hopefully it’ll be 402!
Coming up we have a decision to make since the Eastern Continental Trail that we’re currently on travels through 7 miles of thick swamps that have not seen trail maintenance in 2 or 3 years. Twig, who we met the other day, told us that a group of Florida Trail Association hikers went out to assess the damage and it took them over 7 hours of crawling on their hands and knees through overgrowth and swimming a good portion of the time to get through that section of trail. I think with the additional 2.5+ inches of rain that just fell we would probably be drowning as we attempted to bushwhack so we’re just gonna skip this section and take the alternate road walk instead. It would be good fun but at this point we’re about to have a lot of swamp walking and I don’t wanna have to spend an entire extra day crawling on my hands and knees through sawgrass blades that are so jagged and sharp that it’ll slice you up and draw blood. Blood attracts gators and who knows what else. No thank you! Plus we’ll have enough swamp walking on the Florida Trail as it is so we are good. I think Cashmere, Cookie and Tick Tock also opted for the road walk instead so it seems the road walk is what other hikers are doing. And in the comments in the FarOut navigation app most everyone said that they have skipped this section as well so we’re just gonna let this slide and walk the miles another way that isn’t an overgrown swamp hell!
