Swamped

oosting birds scatter from treetops as Bill Evans' helicopter whirs across Florida's Big Cypress Swamp. With herons, egrets and wood storks fluttering like brilliant white confetti below, he circles a stand of cypress trees, providing a glimpse down through the silvery canopy at a wild, hidden world.

With cool, parched winter winds drying the vast sea of wetland prairies that dominate South Florida's landscape, the water pounding around the bulbous cypress trunks lures thirsty native animals to drink and splash and to eat and be eaten. Birds and alligators, bears and white tail deer, frogs and turtles and snakes all gather at the watering hole. Even the most secretive and rare of creatures, the Florida panther, makes an occasional appearance.

The sight of just one cypress dome is enough to move a refugee from the snowbound North to tears of joy this February day. But the wild, subtropical landscape is not called Big Cypress for nothing. Evans, a helicopter pilot at Big Cypress National Preserve, swoops out over a sea of silvery gray cypress domes and islands of bright green slash pines and hardwoods floating in winter brown marshes. The treetops sprawl against a robin's egg blue sky and lend a look of rolling hills to the flat South Florida peninsula and-with so much biological wealth bubbling under the canopies of trees-assure the preserve's distinction as an ecological treasure.

Yet Big Cypress-2,400 square miles of forested swamps and grassy prairies-came very close to becoming another Florida development disaster. Thirty years ago, powerful local politicians and commercial interests were hell-bent on wringing dry this soggy landscape and building the world's largest airport. They came hot on the heels of land speculators, who by then already had sold tens of thousands of checkerboard-square lots here to sun-starved Northerners. The development scheme finally was derailed by an unlikely alliance of rough-hewn outdoor enthusiasts-hunters, fishermen and off-road joy riders-and silk-stocking conservationists. Congress and President Nixon hopped on the bandwagon in 1974, setting aside Big Cypress as the first in a new line of National Park Service preserves.

While the term "preserve" might suggest that use of an area would be strictly limited, Big Cypress has welcomed just about every kind of practice that environmentalists now are fighting to exclude from public lands. Unlike its older and more famous neighbor, Everglades National Park, where a canoe is the only means of transportation allowed off the pavement, Big Cypress accommodates free-wheeling riders of airboats, all-terrain vehicles and swamp buggies-home-built contraptions that rumble along on monster truck tires. Its lands also are used by hunters and gatherers of all kinds, oil drillers, cattlemen, two Indian tribes, owners of dozens of backcountry hunting camps, and pilots of aircraft-from the single-prop planes that use three private airstrips to the Boeing-747s that make training runs and land on the one large runway built during the great 1970s fight over the airport. "Nothing's easy down here," says the preserve's beleaguered superintendent, John Donahue. "Over at Everglades National Park, the answer to questions about use is usually 'no.' Here, everything is 'yes, but.' It's what comes after the 'but' that gets you in trouble."

Donahue and his predecessors have had plenty of trouble. They learned the hard way that it's impossible to manage so many competing uses in one place-even a very big place-and not step on toes or smudge one of the nation's ecological jewels. The swamp's designation as a preserve doesn't relieve the Park Service from having to protect and restore natural resources, which at Big Cypress include 34 endangered species of plants and animals afforded special protection under federal and state laws. Of the 98 surviving Florida panthers, 58 roam in Big Cypress, federal biologists say.

The conflict between maintaining a playground for people and protecting natural resources is at the heart of every fight in Big Cypress. In recent years, the preserve has been sued by environmentalists who want to curb off-road vehicular access to the backcountry; by sportsmen angry about efforts to limit their freewheeling ways; and by the Miccosukee Indian tribe, upset by the preserve's allegedly lax management of natural resources. A politically wired southwestern Florida family has been pushing to dramatically increase oil production in the swamp. And the Miccosukee and Seminole Indian tribes have applied for permits to build a small number of houses in the preserve, saying the legislation that set aside Big Cypress allows for reoccupation by the tribes, who were driven into the Everglades by the Army in the 19th century. Donahue says preserve officials will study the proposals. "This is a living, breathing, evolving cultural landscape," he says.

OIL AND BUGGIES

Managers of federal lands everywhere are taking note of what happens in Big Cypress. Mixed use of federal lands is important to the Bush administration, which has embraced a philosophy of making off-road riders, ranchers, miners, oil drillers and others feel at home. "Everything I ever heard the president or Interior secretary say about public land is embodied in Big Cypress National Preserve," Donahue says.

But in two important cases, the Bush administration has acted to restrict activities in Big Cypress that are allowed elsewhere. Last year, the administration proposed paying $120 million to purchase the rights to oil and gas extraction in the part of the preserve controlled by the families of Barron and Miles Collier. They are the sons of Barron G. Collier, a tycoon who once owned 1.25 million acres in Southwest Florida. The families, which own mineral rights to more than half the preserve, had been moving ahead with plans to drill 26 exploratory wells in addition to the nine rigs they now control in the preserve. Congress approved $40 million of the payment in January in the fiscal 2003 omnibus appropriations bill.

And while it has reversed a Clinton administration ban on snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park, the Bush White House is defending Donahue's plan for managing off-road vehicles against a challenge in federal court from sportsmen's groups. Donahue wants to limit buggies to 400 miles of designated trails-many hardened with packed limestone-in the soggy prairies where riders have had free rein for decades.

Environmentalists accustomed to battling the administration's land management policies have praised Bush's efforts to preserve Big Cypress, while whispering that the campaign is aimed largely at winning votes in a state where environmental issues consistently score high in the polls. The cynics note that the administration made its moves on Big Cypress in the months before voters were to decide whether President Bush's brother Jeb would get a second term. And Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., a presidential candidate, said he was "mad as hell" about the administration's oil deal, questioning its price tag and a lack of congressional scrutiny.

"I have a hard time believing oil development in Big Cypress would do $120 million worth of damage. Period," says Florida environmentalist Nathaniel Reed. As an assistant Interior secretary in the Nixon administration, Reed engineered the initial Big Cypress deal. "It's pretty damn hard to believe federal taxpayers are going to bail out the Colliers," he says.

The oil deal has attracted national attention, but it has been less of an issue in Florida. Most environmentalists and Park Service officials weren't alarmed by the Colliers' oil-drilling plans, viewing them simply as an effort to engineer a land swap or cash deal. Oil fields have been active in Big Cypress since 1943, and most locals believe federal and state rules that require restoration of oil sites are adequate.

The off-road vehicle issue is generating more heat locally. From above, wetland prairies on the west side of the preserve seem covered by tread marks. It looks like several giant cats have used the ground as a scratching post. Some of those treads are deep enough to swallow a leg to the knee. They hold standing water even in the dry season. About 20,000 miles of such ruts stretch through the preserve, according to an analysis by University of Georgia. The trails are almost 10 times the distance between Washington and Los Angeles.

Ron Hostetter, a wetlands expert at the University of Miami, says the ruts, which last a long time, can dramatically alter water flow and degrade wildlife habitats by encouraging infestations of exotic weeds. Anything that messes with water flow in Big Cypress is serious, because the preserve contains some of the cleanest water in the region. Its flow is vital to the booming recreational fisheries in the Everglades. "When they surveyed the future Everglades National Park in the early 1940s, there was a swamp buggy trail around the perimeter. And the scars of that trail are still visible today," he says. The buggy damage at Big Cypress, he says, may take as long as a century to heal.

In response to a 1995 lawsuit by environmentalists angered about the off-road vehicle damage, Donahue's staff completed a management plan in 2000. It designates 400 buggy trails and restricts off-road access to the preserve to 15 places instead of 70. The cost of implementing the plan over 10 years is $30 million. "What we did here is a model for Yellowstone and other places with off-road vehicle issues," Donahue says. "The key difference in what we did here from what was tried elsewhere is that we didn't ban any uses. We regulated them." The plan raises the price of an off-road permit from $35 to $50-about 100 times less than what the preserve needs to cover the costs of overseeing off-road use and implementing the plan, Donahue says.

EXPANDING ACCESS

Beyond limiting damage from off-road vehicles, Donahue says, a third of the plan's cost would go toward expanding access to Big Cypress from U.S. 41, a two-lane highway known as the Tamiami Trail, which crosses the southern third of the preserve. The plan calls for parking lots, boardwalks and picnic tables along the road. "Millions of people go to Naples and Marco Island each winter, and they're not visiting us," Donahue says. "We'd like to encourage them to hike and bike here."

The preserve draws an estimated 500,000 visitors a year, about a third of the number who visit Everglades National Park and far short of the 1.6 million visitors projected for Big Cypress when it was created three decades ago. The estimate includes people who take tours and educated guesses about the number who stop alongside the highway to gawk at birds and alligators in the canal at the northern edge of the road.

The preserve's new trails seem unpopular with everyone. Environmentalists are pleased with the effort to regulate off-road riders, but they worry that drivers of sport utility vehicles will start using the 12-foot-wide limestone roads, ruining the wilderness and damaging habitats of endangered animals. The preserve limits backcountry permits for use of the roads to 2,000 a year. But Brian Scherf of the Biodiversity Project, which filed the 1995 lawsuit, says the next superintendent might be under pressure to allow more use of the trails to justify their $30 million cost. "These trails have a lot of the characteristics of regular roads," he says. "They can carry the weight of a 22-ton dump truck. They could easily handle SUVs."

An SUV would be put to the test on one of the oldest trails-a former farming and logging road known as the Concho Billie Trail. The Park Service improved nine miles of the trail with limestone as a test case for the rest of the system. The ride along the trail in a swamp buggy is slow and rough. On some stretches, the buggy bounces up and down on rocks jutting out of the sand. It feels like sitting in a rowboat tied to a dock during a high wind.

"We have to think about what these roads will bring in 20 years," Scherf says. "There could be backcountry development of campsites and comfort stations. The buggies will be replaced by high-powered SUVs, and before you know it, the whole wilderness nature of the preserve has gone down the drain."

Local swamp buggy clubs aren't any happier with the new rules. Along with a national group, the U.S. Sportsmen's Alliance, they sued the National Park Service in U.S. District Court in Naples last year. They accused the preserve's managers of violating the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act by failing to prepare a detailed assessment of the buggy plan's potential impact on natural resources. The clubs also said preserve officials played a "bait and switch" game by releasing a draft that did not resemble the final document. The plan, they argue, doesn't differentiate between wheeled buggies and airboats, and doesn't make adjustments for changes in the landscape. "The plan that was adopted is asinine," says Bill Horn, a Washington attorney who represents the swamp buggy riders. "It's going to create more problems than it solves."

Horn, a former assistant secretary of the Interior under President Reagan and a former member of President George W. Bush's transition team, decries the preserve's vehicle management plan as a political gift to conservation groups from the Clinton administration. "It was nothing more than a chance for the Clinton administration to pay homage to a core constituency," Horn says.

Issues such as the swamp buggy rules are particularly important to sportsmen's groups because the preserve was supposed to assure them they could enjoy the area forever, says Horn, who also represents snowmobile enthusiasts and dune buggy riders in disputes involving other federal lands. "Big Cypress wasn't made part of Everglades National Park, it wasn't made a wildlife refuge, it was made a preserve," Horn says. "The problem is that here we are 28 years later, and the original players from the environmental groups are gone. Now, there are animal rights groups and others who weren't aware of the original deal. We say, a deal is a deal. This is a very unique unit, and the political understandings and agreements need to be honored."

FULL OF SURPRISES

The Big Cypress off-road issue speaks volumes about the changes in America since the preserve was created. The new management plan reflects the population's shift away from rural areas to the suburbs. Swamp-buggy riders and hunters are on the decline, but the ranks of hikers, bikers and bird watchers are growing rapidly. Local sportsmen go so far as to characterize the preserve's efforts to attract suburban visitors as "cultural cleansing."

"The sporting community sees itself as founders of America's conservation movement, and it continues to be mystified that so many environmental organizations have become anti-sportsman, anti-hunter," Horn says. "Why would you take this well-organized group and systematically alienate them on issues like this? You need off-road vehicles in Big Cypress. You just don't stomp around on foot in that territory. Not if you want to live very long."

Reed, the former assistant secretary of the Interior under Nixon,sharply disagrees with Horn's characterization of the off-road management plan. "In the last 25 years, usage of off-road vehicles in the backcountry has gone up, and despite modifications and weight restrictions of those vehicles, the damage they have done is extraordinary," Reed says. "For a National Park Service area that is unacceptable.

"The new rules, I'm sure, are vexing to those who are used to going in any direction, at any speed they want to," Reed adds. "But rules are necessary if we are to keep the integrity of Big Cypress intact."

The management plan ultimately may be drowned in federal red ink. The preserve already has spent $5 million in the last two fiscal years getting equipment and preparing the first 35 miles of hardened trails. But the fiscal 2003 budget provided only $1 million instead of the $5 million the Park Service had requested.

Money's always an issue at Big Cypress. Employees at the preserve resent the larger budget and staff at Everglades National Park. Big Cypress had 85 full-time employees and a $5.3 million budget in fiscal 2003, compared with the 330 employees and an $18 million budget at the Everglades. Donahue says the preserve has managed to get by in recent years by not filling vacancies in its ranger corps. "In a place like this, we live on lapses in jobs," he says.

Given the demands of overseeing off-road riders, the preserve needs to fill ranger slots now. It won't be easy. "This is a tough place to work, a tough place to patrol," Chief Ranger J.D. Lee says. "You get one ranger making a stop with four guys who are carrying multiple guns. And alcohol is often involved." Many of the people stopped have some connection to the 500 to 800 squatters' hunting camps the Park Service razed and burned when the preserve was founded. "Every hard-core group on every single issue has some link to those camps," Lee says. Rangers stay an average of two years in Big Cypress, half the normal stay throughout the Park Service. "We get them just long enough to get them trained up," Lee says. "They figure out how to get around and then they're gone."

To lure rangers, the preserve boasts "beautiful white sandy beaches" in its job ads and offers some of the best housing in the National Park Service. Preserve officials have purchased first-rate equipment. But there are catches. The beaches are 30 miles away, the houses back up to canals whose alligators can gobble children and pets and, in the summer, the preserve is infested by mosquitoes. "It's not an easy sell," Donahue says.

But people who have been sold on Big Cypress are passionate about it. They love that the place survived the land speculators, the airport schemers, farmers and loggers. They love the spooky intimacy of a trail in a dark, dense cypress swamp. One such section of the Concho Billie Trail is decorated by spiky pineapple-like plants and guarded by a 6-foot alligator, which sits in a rare patch of sun on a sandbar at the swamp's entrance. "That's his spot. He's always there," says John Adams, who's been hunting and buggy riding in Big Cypress "for eons" and is now overseeing trail construction.

Evans, the preserve's helicopter pilot, also loves the place. He routinely enjoys glorious views and rarely has to get his feet wet. Heading south over the prairies of dwarf cypress trees in February, he can see the 10,000 Islands and the Gulf of Mexico.

"The place is full of surprises," Evans says. In fact, a few days earlier, a local fireman and his girlfriend went biking and got lost in the swamp. They wandered for hours until the fireman finally was able to find a spot where his mobile phone got a signal. The couple was wet, cold, scared and just one and a half miles off the trail. "They were," Evans says, "very happy to see us."