Everglades Backcountry Wilderness Camping Permits

Backcountry camping in Everglades National Park, near Homestead, Florida, is spread across water-access sites in mangrove and coastal wilderness managed by the National Park Service. The photographs show two kinds of ground. Some sites are chickees: wooden platforms raised on pilings over open water, each under a metal roof, joined by a walkway with a portable toilet set between them and a wall of mangrove close behind. Others are beaches, where a tent pitches on pale shell-and-sand ground scattered with driftwood and low brush, open water a few steps away. The approach is by water. One view from a kayak looks down a narrow channel roofed by mangrove branches and walled by their prop roots, the surface dark and glassy. Another looks across a flat bay at dusk with mangrove silhouetted along the far shore.