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You can camp at a chickee out in the middle of the ocean - probably what I would do to avoid all of the snakes.
For me it is venemous snakes. The alligators might worry me a bit, but not as much as the snakes. That is why I can't live any further south than I do now. At the bottom of the pages on the Everglades site is a random "Did You Know?" fact. Several times I got to read the one that says something like "The Everglades has 28 species of snakes, and only four are venemous." Coming from an area with no venemous snakes, I was thinking, "What do you mean ONLY!!!"
Thanks. I did a overnight last year on a river up near Clearwater last year. Looking for something a little more remote. Any one done a multi-day trip in Florida?
I was talking to some friends a couple of weeks ago and discovered they had done some backcountry canoe camping in the Everglades last winter. I didn't even know that there was backcountry camping in the Everglades. I came home that evening and decided to look it up. All of the information I needed to make an interactive map of the park was there, so I decided to add it. Along the way I discovered nearby Biscayne National Park has some good paddling routes as well, though there isn't any "real" backcountry camping.
Here is the new map - Everglades and Biscayne National Parks
The Everglades receives about 1,000,000 visitors per year, but only about 5,000 of those are backcountry campers. The best paddling is when all of the northern lakes are locked up in ice. (During the summer the bugs are too bad.) The premier backcountry route is the 99-mile Wilderness Waterway. The park has a great backcountry trip planning guide with a lot more information.
The Everglades has three types of backcountry campsites - ground, beach, and chickee. The ground campsites are, well, sleeping on the ground. Beach campsites are, of course, camping on the beach. Chickees are pretty unique - they are platforms out in the middle of the ocean.
I've had fun exploring the website and, since paddling season up here is winding up, dreaming of paddling down there during the winter. While using the interactive map on this site, I would encourage exploring the Everglades website since there is a lot of information I just can't fit on the maps here.