2005/03 Deep South trip - Okefenokee Swamp |
|||
Sunday March 17th
Sunday was even warmer than Saturday, hitting the 80s in early morning. It was tempting to stay, but we’d seen most of the lake already, and Sandie was suffering from paddlers’ disease, a bad back. So we set off across the Florida Panhandle on I-10, heading for the Okefenokee swamp.
One of Sandie’s Christmas presents was a set of CDs of Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher novel, about 24 CDs of an hour each, so we’ve been listening to that as we’ve driven the long stretches across the country. This was an easy stretch, only two CDs to listen to.
As we crossed into Georgia, the sign said “Thanks for having Georgia on your mind”, which only really makes sense if you’re a Willie Nelson fan. From the border we followed the Suwanee River into the Okefenokee National wildlife Refuge and Georgia’s Stephen Foster state park. Foster wrote the “Way down upon the Suwanee River” song, but never ever saw the river. The name scanned nicely and that’s all he needed to know.
We set up camp and just had time to walk a couple of trails into the swamp. It’s a tangle of trees and shrubs standing in a few feet of water. We could hear something walking through the water but never saw what it was, probably a deer. We’d been warned that there were alligators in the water, and we saw our first 
one at the end of the walk, only about five feet long. It floated serenely with fish jumping around it until one of them got too close, and then there was an explosion of spray as it turned sideways and took the fish. By the time we had finished looking around it was dark and I took this one ghostly picture with a flash as the alligator sank underwater.
Even the campground has patches of water, and a network of ditches to take away the excess. Looking at it we expected to be eaten alive by mosquitoes, but apparently they are not a big problem here until summer.
Monday March 14th
Monday dawned warm (70 degrees), cloudy, and very humid. We had signed up for the ranger’s boat trip next morning, 
and Tony the Ranger took us out in the pontoon boat, along Billy’s Lake, which is a wide stretch of the Suwanee River. He had no trouble finding alligators; they were swimming and sunbathing, some perched on logs, others lying on rafts of vegetation. They are not as large as Australia’s salties, but much larger than the freshies, up to 12 feet long. The rafts of vegetation give the swamp its name. “Okefenokee” means “trembling earth”. Methane gas bubbling up causes the peat in the swamp bed to float to the surface, and then a progression of plants take root in it and it steadily becomes more solid, firm enough to support an alligator laid out flat, but not enough to support a tourist. This is difficult country to get around in.
In the afternoon we hiked the Uplands Pine Trail which runs along one of the islands in the park. The islands are the few rare spots where there is dry ground. However, we found that people walking the trail had depressed the ground to where whole sections of the trail were underwater. So we edged around giant puddles and took great leaps to avoid them. By the end of our walk, we had thunder clouds all around us.
After the rain we revisited the swamp trails. In contrast, these were dry, mostly on boardwalk above the water. We heard the footsteps in the water again, and this time we just stood and waited for the animal to show up. It turned out to be a white-tailed deer, wading through the swamp, and foraging amongst the shrubs. I guess the alligators don’t bother hunting in the tangles of shrubs and trees, so the deer don’t get eaten unless they stray close to the main waterways.