The Ten Thousand Islands: Florida's Last Genuinely Confusing Place

Start with the name, which is wrong in an instructive way. There are not ten thousand islands. Depending on the tide and how you define an island, there are somewhere between several hundred and a great many thousand, and the number changes twice a day. The place resists counting, which tells you most of what you need to know about it.

It begins just south of Marco Island and runs down the coast to Everglades City and beyond, a fifty-mile band of mangrove keys, oyster bars, tidal creeks and shallow bays that forms the western edge of the Everglades system. Some of it is national wildlife refuge, some is national park, and effectively none of it is developed.

Why it looks like that

Red mangroves build land. A propagule drifts, catches on an oyster bar, roots, and starts trapping sediment in the tangle beneath it. Over decades the trapped silt becomes a mound, the mound becomes an island, the island grows black mangrove and buttonwood behind the red fringe, and eventually a shell midden or a hurricane rearranges the whole calculation.

The Calusa, who ran this coast for well over a thousand years before Europeans arrived, accelerated the process by piling oyster shell into deliberate mounds. Several of the islands out here are, in part, archaeological structures. Chokoloskee is the famous one. You can stand on a shell mound that is thirty feet of discarded lunch.

What lives there

The estuary is the nursery for essentially everything that lives in the near-shore Gulf, which makes it dense with life in a way that open water is not.

• Snook, redfish and tarpon in the creeks and along the mangrove edges. Tarpon in the backcountry from roughly April through July is one of the great fisheries in North America.
• Bottlenose dolphins, which push far up into the estuary on high water and hunt the creek mouths on the fall.
• West Indian manatees, common in the warmer months and concentrated in the rivers when the Gulf cools.
• Roseate spoonbills, wood storks, reddish egrets, white pelicans in winter, and frigatebirds hanging over the passes.
• American crocodiles at the southern end — genuinely, this is the northern edge of their range — alongside the far more numerous alligators in the fresher water inland.

How people actually visit

By small boat, from Naples or Marco

The most common approach, and the one that covers the most ground. A shallow-draft boat can run the outside beaches and then duck into the creeks, which is the combination that makes the trip. This needs local knowledge — the channels are unmarked, the oyster bars are unforgiving, and the chart is a suggestion.

By kayak, from Everglades City

The purist option. The Wilderness Waterway runs 99 miles from Everglades City to Flamingo and people paddle it over eight or nine days, camping on chickees and beach sites by permit. Even a day paddle out of Chokoloskee Bay is a serious undertaking; the tide moves faster than most people expect and the wind has a long fetch.

By airboat, mostly not

Airboats belong on the freshwater sawgrass inland, not in the saltwater mangrove estuary. If a trip is sold as Ten Thousand Islands but leaves from a canal off the Tamiami Trail, you are getting the Everglades, which is a fine thing but a different thing.

Navigation, or the lack of it

This is the part visitors underestimate. Every mangrove island looks exactly like every other mangrove island. There are no landmarks, the creeks branch and rejoin, and at low tide the route you came in on is a mud flat. People get genuinely lost here — it has a long history of it, from Spanish survey parties to the modern boater who trusted a phone with no signal.

If you are going in without a guide: paper chart, real GPS, a compass, tide tables, more fuel than the trip requires, and a float plan left with someone on shore. If that list sounds excessive, that is the argument for going with someone who runs it weekly. A guided run out of Naples covers Rookery Bay, the back of Keewaydin and the northern islands comfortably in a half day and skips the part where you spend an hour aground on an oyster bar.

When to go

November through April is the dry season: fewer bugs, lower humidity, more comfortable everything. May and June are excellent on the water and the tarpon fishing peaks. July through September the estuary is at its most alive and also at its most demanding — heat, afternoon storms, and no-see-ums at dusk that will change your personality.

The mosquitoes here were the reason this coast stayed empty for four hundred years. They have not been informed that the situation has changed.