South Florida Camping

South Florida is the Everglades — the last 200 miles of the peninsula, a mosaic of sawgrass prairie, cypress strand, pine rockland, and mangrove estuary defined by the slow freshwater sheetflow the region is named for. It spans Miami-Dade and Collier counties, the sugar country west of Lake Okeechobee, and the Ten Thousand Islands fringe. Public land dominates: Everglades National Park, Big Cypress National Preserve, and a ring of state forests and WMAs together cover more acreage than any other Florida region. Camping skews primitive — gravel pads in mosquito-heavy backcountry — with a short list of developed sites near the park entrances.

The core inventory is Everglades National Park (Long Pine Key, plus paddle-in sites on the Wilderness Waterway), Big Cypress National Preserve (Monument Lake, Midway, Burns Lake, Bear Island), and Collier-Seminole State Park on the western edge of the Tamiami Trail. Biscayne National Park offers water-only camping at Boca Chita and Elliott Key. Metro Miami adds Oleta River State Park and Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park; Fisheating Creek WMA in Palmdale is the region's best-known paddling and primitive destination.

The window is the dry season, roughly December through April, when mosquitoes retreat, temperatures drop into the 60s and 70s, and standing water lowers enough to expose the backcountry pads. Summer is effectively un-campable in the interior — heat, humidity, biting insects, and daily thunderstorms compound. The region is fully exposed to Atlantic hurricanes; peak risk runs August through October. On clear winter nights, the interior delivers some of the darkest skies in the eastern United States.