Section 3.4: Everglades Adventures Outside the Park

Kayaking Florida’s inland waterways offers a peaceful alternative to airboat tours — perfect for exploring the greater Everglades ecosystem. Photo courtesy of VISIT FLORIDA.

On the wild side for exploring the Everglades are airboat tours—not available in the park itself, but operating pretty much everywhere else, from Sawgrass Recreation Park Everglades Airboat Eco Adventures, west of Fort Lauderdale, to Wooten’s Everglades Airboat Tours in Ochopee, southeast of Naples and noteworthy for being home to the smallest post office in the nation as well as the Skunk Ape Research Center. 

Outside park boundaries, Everglades and wetlands continue through the center of South Florida and past Lake Okeechobee. Stay close to them by staying in Clewiston or LaBelle, nestled between the lake’s south shores and the pristine wetlands of the northern Everglades. 

Spectators can catch rodeo events at the LaBelle Rodeo Arena. 

The western Everglades ecosystem continues into the Charlotte Estuary and the Telegraph Swamp, a cypress strand swamp encompassing part of the Babcock Ranch, just east of Punta Gorda, which spans a diverse mosaic of pinelands, dry prairie ecosystems interspersed with cypress domes and cypress swamps. 

Together with nearby conservation lands, including the Babcock-Webb Wildlife Management Area and Caloosahatchee Regional Park, the Preserve is a habitat for such wide-ranging species as the Florida black bear and Florida panther, along with abundant populations of white-tailed deer and native wild turkey. 

There are hiking trails through the Preserve, including the Footprints Trail offering five miles of trails in several different loops; and the EcoTour Trail, a 1.5-mile hike through pine flatwoods. Visitors can also join a narrated 90-minute excursion with Babcock Ranch Eco-Tours, offering swamp buggy safaris through the wetlands, where they’ll glimpse alligators, wild hogs and Sandhill cranes, among other wildlife.