The shady opening stretch: a mangrove boardwalk past black-mangrove breathing roots, sea oxeye and glasswort, out to the Wildlife Drive crossing.
You start in the cool of it — a boardwalk winding through a low tangle of mangroves and tropical hammock, the one shady stretch you'll get, so enjoy it while it lasts. Look down beside the walk and you'll see the ground bristling with hundreds of little dark spikes poking up out of the mud, like a bed of pencils stood on end. Those belong to the black mangrove, and they're breathing tubes — snorkels — that let the tree pull air down to roots drowning in airless salt mud. Around them grows a low carpet of silvery sea oxeye and fat, jointed glasswort, both of them salt-drinkers that would kill an ordinary plant.
This whole community lives on salt water, which almost nothing green can do — and that quiet chemical miracle is the foundation of everything you came here to see. Up ahead the boardwalk ends and you'll come to the Wildlife Drive. Look both ways for cars idling along at their fifteen miles an hour, step across, and pick up the shell dike on the far side. That's where the trail truly begins — and where the shade ends. Hat on.
Photo: RealGatba · CC0
