Everglades may not be our largest national park (that honor belongs to Wrangell-St. Elias in Alaska), but it is certainly the wettest. During and after the rainy season, when not only the mangrove swamp but also the sawgrass prairie is under water, most of the park abounds in fish and other water life, and even the white-tailed deer leads a semi-aquatic existence.

Despite the fact that it is low, flat, and largely under water, Everglades is a park of many environments: shallow, key-dotted Florida Bay; the coastal prairie; the vast mangrove forest and its mysterious waterways; cypress swamps; the true everglades—an extensive freshwater marsh dotted with tree islands and occasional ponds; and the driest zone, the pine-and-hammock rockland.