After returning from the canoe trip, I’ve been back to the easy stuff, the Anhinga Trail. It’s an easy place to shoot and keep your feet dry, but it still makes nice photos. Tomorrow I’m planning on getting back in the water and walking around a cypress dome.

With the photo on my home page of an alligator, it’s been hard to top that one. But how could you come to the everglades without posting some photos of an alligator? Here are a few alligator shots.

Nap time for the alligators.

You can get up close and personal with the wildlife on the Anhinga Trail. The thing I love about this photo is you can see the reflection of the boardwalk in the eye.

Here is a cropped in version of the above photo, you can see the boardwalk and that is me on top taking the photo.

The eyes of the cormorants are an amazing turquoise, I believe that their eyes change color during the mating season, I’ll have to check into that for sure though.

A wood stork and a black vulture share a roost in the early morning light.

Well I survived the Wilderness Waterway and back in the world of electricity, running water and cold beer. The trip went pretty good, no major problems at all. I ate well, slept well and had some great paddling. Some days were pretty windy which made for some hard paddling too. It was great to spend so much time outside in such a wonderful remote place. I rarely saw other people but one night I spent at Graveyard Creek I shared the night with 4 fishermen from Orlando and a guy who was sailing his 21 foot sailboat to Central America. We listened to Steve play Neal Young songs by the campfire on his accordion he brings with him in his sailboat. That had to be a first at Graveyard Creek.

I was forced to paddle the outside route because the one camp you need to get into the inside the first day was booked up for several days due to a large Outward Bound group that launched the day before I did. So unfortunately I didn’t go on the inside at all. But the outer islands are beautiful too and enjoyed spending a lot of time on the beaches. But the wind is more of a factor on the outside so I did have to change my float plan some along the way to sit out some windy days and then make up for time lost on calm days.

I haven’t really gone through all the photos yet so I will just post a few. I kept a journal while out, it gave me something to do after dark and will be sharing that on the blog later. I think I will wait till I get to Madison to post that. I only have 4 more days left of shooting here in Everglades National Park before my residency is done so I want to spend that time shooting rather than at my laptop.

I’ll post a few photos I’ve picked out so far. I’ll be posting the rest when I’m posting the journal in early February.

A red mangrove on the first night out near Jewel Key.

Pavilion Key was covered in sea shells mixed in with the roots of trees on the beach.

This is certainly the first time I’ve taken a photo of a dead fish and called it art. But with the recent cold spell there has been a large fish kill in the Everglades. With the beaches littered with dead fish, one was bound to wind up in an interesting composition.

Some driftwood on Hog Key.

Highland Beach has to be one of my favorite places in the world. Forty miles from anywhere, I had the place all to myself. I was planning on spending two nights here, but winds and large swells kept me from paddling far the day before and had to just spend one night to stay on time.

After planning this crazy thing since May, it’s here. Tomorrow I launch for 11 days crossing the Everglades. I’m a little nervous, a little excited, but mostly just wondering what I’ve forgotten. Last night doing the final packing I realized I had packed shorts but no pants! (the jeans I’m wearing now would make a poor pair of pants to wear getting in and out of a canoe for 11 days) Luckily the Everglades city hardware store had some lightweight fishing pants in stock. Once I had everything in the pickup last night and sat down for a beer, I noticed the maps sitting on the end table next to me.

So now I’ve got pants and maps! I think I’m all set.

So here is the itinerary for the campsites I’m planning on being at…

13th – Jewel Key
14th- Pavilion Key
15th- New Turkey Key
16th- Hog Key
17th- Highland Beach
18th- Highland Beach (I’m staying two nights)
19th- Graveyard Creek
20th- Northwest Cape Sable
21st- Middle Cape Sable
22nd- East Cape Sable
23rd- should arrive in Flamingo! (where my car will be waiting thanks to Jason and Meghan Easterly shuttling my pickup to Flamingo while I’m gone)

If all goes as planned Nazan will be posting my location after I send my “okay” message each night where I’m camping- see my earlier post about the Spot Messenger.

Here we go, should be a memorable trip.

Nazan and I started our anniversary with an sunrise visit to the Anhinga Trail, which was a very cold windy morning. Then we decided to hike some more sheltered places like the Royal Palm Hammock and the Pinelands Trail. In the evening we took advantage of some of the great Mexican food here in Homestead, they even had the Packers game on so we got to watch the packers loose.

This first photo I have to give credit to Nazan for pointing it out to me. She has a pretty good eye for interesting details. This is a fern, which at the moment the name escapes me, and the dots under the frond are the spores.

Here is the fabulous bird that the Anhinga Trail is named after, there are hundreds of anhingas and they are starting to nest. The turquoise color around their red eyes comes during breeding season.

Here is a frost photo from this morning. I’ll have to find out when the last frost in the Everglades was, I would image this is not a very common occurrence. This afternoon driving back into the park after taking Nazan to the airport I could see it damaged many plants, there were a lot of trees and shrubs looking pretty brown.

I didn’t post these yesterday being I wasn’t that excited about these photos, but being today I got rained out they look better to me now compared to today’s wash out. So here they are. My morning routine has become going to the Anhinga Trail at first light being it’s close the house, it’s a great place to photograph birds. So the first photo is of a great blue heron from the Anhinga Trail and the second is from the Snake Bight Trail. I had to ask why it’s called the Snake “Bight” Trail. I didn’t know this but a bight is a bay within a bay. So it has nothing to do with a “bite”.

Bromeliads are common in the Everglades, they are cool looking air plants or epiphyte, meaning they grow on other plants and trees.

Today I felt like I am getting into the rhythm of things. This morning was some disappointing light at the Anhinga Trail and it looked like it might be cloudy all day. So I decided to go canoeing at West Lake and found some nice mangroves along the shoreline and some cool clouds to go with then. Then I caught sunset in the dwarf cypress trees again.

Mangroves are always a great subject, it’s easy to see were they got the nickname “walking trees” They grown mainly in the coastal areas of the Everglades and their northern most range is around the Tampa area because they don’t tolerate frost very well. But even with the recent frosts in Florida these coastal areas usually stay above freezing because of the water, which traps heat from the day.

The sun managed to finally poke though the clouds right at sunset and made for some good light tonight in the dwarf cypress forest. These cypress trees are called dwarf trees because they don’t grow very tall because of the soil conditions. Some trees only 6 or 8 feet tall can be hundreds of years old.