Florida is transforming the Everglades

EVERGLADES NATIONAL PARK, Fla. -- Not far from where the tram full of tourists glimpsed an alligator lurking among saw grasses, a guide dares them to wade knee-deep into the swampy, dark water surrounding them.

"Is she serious? Are you going to go in?" Kathy Nubling asked her husband, Al, not budging from her seat.

The California couple was touring the country trying to visit every national park. Just to be adventurous, they bared their feet, crossed the wet grass and stepped blindly into the black water.

The Everglades has never been a glamorous vacation spot. Despite efforts to promote the wetland as an eco-tourism destination, the inhospitable scenery keeps many tourists at Florida's more popular beaches and theme parks.

As if mosquitoes and smothering humidity weren't enough to tarnish the park's image, decades of development and pollution have swallowed more than 5,000 square miles, half of the original wetlands. The changes wiped out some of the wildlife and surroundings that would be among the park's biggest attractions.

An $8.4 billion restoration project, now under way after years of planning, aims to reverse some of that damage. State officials hope the plan -- billed as the world's largest environmental restoration project -- will lure more tourists to discover the rare wilderness.

"People who live in Indiana will scrimp and save because they want to make sure they take their kids to see the Grand Canyon. I hope with this kind of investment, people in Indiana will scrimp and save so they can make sure their kids have seen the Everglades," Florida Department of Environmental Protection Secretary David Struhs said.

Everglades National Park is the largest national park east of the Rocky Mountains, covering 1.5 million acres. More than a million people visit its sawgrass prairies, mangrove shorelines and cypress forests each year, but that number is a fraction of the more than 75 million vacationers who came to Florida last year. The number of annual visitors to the park also has dropped off substantially since the early 1970s, when visitation peaked at more than 1.7 million people.

Meanwhile, millions more visitors are heading to other national parks each year, including Grand Canyon, Yellowstone and Yosemite national parks. In the last decade, visitors to Grand Canyon National Park have approached 5 million.

It doesn't help that Everglades National Park is recognized as the nation's most threatened. More than a dozen species are endangered, making it difficult for visitors to snap pictures of many of them, including the Florida panther, West Indian manatee and red-cockaded woodpecker.

The bird population has dwindled to 10 percent of what it was in the early 1900s when hunters started killing birds for their fashionable feathers. Despite the decline, bird watching has become one of the park's most popular activities.

Shirley McBride, a tour guide at the park's Shark Valley Visitors Center, often tells groups of visitors that hunters would make more off an ounce of feathers than they would if they had discovered the same in gold.

While hunters started abusing the Everglades in the late 1800s, the worst disruptions started in the 1940s, when developers began carving the marshland with roads for subdivisions and canals to control flooding. The changes permanently altered the flow and depth of the slow-moving river. Pollution from farms and urban areas over the past few decades has choked out more native habitat, making some of the wetland's unique plant life hard to spot.

Tour guides recognize that many visitors understand little about the complicated ecosystem and spin tales that make it relevant, at least for Floridians.

Appreciating the Everglades, the tranquil waters, towering cypress trees and sawgrass prairies that stretch for miles until they touch the clear blue sky, just takes more time, says tour operator David Harraden.

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