Everglades Tours from Marco Island

Everglades City is a grid of about four hundred people at the end of SR-29, built in the 1920s as the company town for the construction of the Tamiami Trail and still visibly shaped by it. The old Collier County courthouse sits on a circle at the centre. It is the last town on this coast, and it feels like it.

Three miles further south, across a causeway, Chokoloskee sits on a Calusa shell mound high enough to have kept its houses through storms that flattened the lower ground. Ted Smallwood's trading post has stood at the water's edge since the early 1900s — the building you walk into dates from 1917 — and it now operates as a museum with most of its original stock still on the shelves. Admission is a few dollars; hours shift between the summer and winter seasons, so check before you drive out.

Both places took serious damage in Hurricane Irma in 2017 and again from storm surge in later seasons, and recovery here has been slow and visible. Some businesses did not come back. That is worth knowing partly so you are not surprised and partly because it is the actual story of living on this coast.

Stone crab is the local product. The season runs through the cooler months and the claws come off the boats here rather than arriving in a truck.

The national park concession runs a pontoon trip into the Ten Thousand Islands lasting around 90 minutes. It is the cheapest ticket into the park's Gulf Coast waters, it carries a reasonable number of people, and the route works the near islands and the river mouths rather than pushing deep. Dolphins are common on it. Book ahead in winter.

Independent operators out of Everglades City and Chokoloskee run smaller boats, longer trips and more flexible routes, and some of them get up the rivers and into the mangrove tunnels that a bigger pontoon cannot enter. Prices sit above the park trip and the experience is usually better for it.

From Marco itself, several captains run half-day trips that reach the refuge and the northern edge of the park without you driving anywhere. That saves an hour and a half of car time and costs more in fuel, which is the trade the price reflects.

Whichever you choose, the two hours around a tide change are the productive ones, and mornings beat afternoons for flat water and for the summer storm line. In winter, a hard cold front can shut small boats down for a day.

Collier-Seminole State Park, twenty minutes east on US-41, is the closest piece of real Everglades habitat to Marco. It holds one of the few coastal tropical hardwood hammocks on this coast, a campground, hiking trails, and the Bay City Walking Dredge — a 1920s machine that walked itself across the swamp building the Tamiami Trail, now parked in the woods with interpretive boards. Its 13-plus-mile marked paddling trail down the Blackwater River is the best kayak route within easy reach of the island.

The Ten Thousand Islands refuge Marsh Trail, on the south side of US-41 a few miles west of Port of the Islands, gives you a mile of walking on a paved-then-gravel path and a two-storey observation tower with scopes. It is free, it takes an hour, and at sunrise it is one of the better birding spots in the county.

Fakahatchee Strand Preserve, north of US-41 past Port of the Islands, is the linear cypress swamp famous for its orchids and bromeliads. The Big Cypress Bend boardwalk is the easy version; guided swamp walks into the strand are the serious one.

Big Cypress National Preserve begins further east and is a different landscape again — cypress, pine and prairie rather than mangrove — with its own visitor centres on US-41.