Shark River Slough

Shark River Slough is the main channel of the Everglades, a band of sawgrass marsh many miles wide through which water moves slowly south and west toward the Gulf of Mexico. It is the river of grass that Marjory Stoneman Douglas described in her 1947 book The Everglades: River of Grass, published the same year Everglades National Park was dedicated. The water is usually only a few feet deep, and in the dry season it creeps through the sawgrass at about a hundred feet a day, speeding up in summer rains. Sawgrass is not a grass but a sedge, and its leaves are edged with tiny saw teeth. Tree islands, raised hammocks of hardwoods, rise from the marsh and point downstream, shaped by the flow. The slough is crossed by the Tamiami Trail, which, when it was completed in 1928, acted as a long dam across the Everglades, blocking water from flowing south into what is now the park. Since 2013 new bridges have been built to lift sections of the road so that water can pass beneath it again. Shark Valley, at the northern edge of the park, sits in the slough, and a paved loop road leads to an observation tower where the view runs across miles of open marsh. Alligators, herons and ibis gather in the canals beside the road. At its southwestern end the slough feeds the Shark River, which carries its water through a broad mangrove forest to the Gulf at Ponce de Leon Bay.