Six Mile Cypress Slough Preserve in Lee County, Florida

Photograph: Cypress buttresses.jpg by Barbara (WVS) · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Restored from the credited Wikimedia Commons file, normalized to the consistent attraction-card frame and converted to WebP by 1stFlorida.com. Portrait originals retain their complete composition over a softly blurred extension of the same photograph.

Lee County attraction

Six Mile Cypress Slough Preserve

Lee County · Gulf Coast

Thirty-five hundred acres of wetland running through the middle of Fort Myers, with a mile and a bit of boardwalk over it.

ABOUT THIS PLACE

The slough itself is nine miles long and about a third of a mile wide, and a watershed of fifty-seven square miles drains into it before the water moves on toward Estero Bay. That filtering is the reason the place was worth saving, and the saving was done by schoolchildren. In the mid-1970s an environmental studies class at a Fort Myers high school, known as the Monday Group, ran a petition drive that put a referendum on the 1976 ballot asking Lee County voters to tax themselves to buy the land. The voters said yes. The boardwalk loops through cypress, pop ash and maple, with observation decks over Gator Lake and Otter Pond and benches along the way. Wading birds, alligators, river otters and barred owls are all regular. An interpretive building and an amphitheater sit by the parking lot. The boardwalk opens dawn to dusk and the interpretive building runs Tuesday to Sunday from ten until four. Parking is charged by the hour up to a daily maximum. Guided walks run in season and are worth the early start

GETTING THERE

Get Directions ↗Official place website ↗

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