Big Cypress Bend boardwalk
— a walk into the cathedral of old cypress.
Not only on a wall.
Big Cypress Bend boardwalk, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“A 2,500-foot boardwalk runs straight into one of the last stands of old-growth bald cypress in Florida, missed by the loggers who took the rest of the Big Cypress Swamp in the 1940s. Royal palms stand in the understory. Alligators rest in the slough. A bald eagle pair has held the nest at the end of the boardwalk for decades.
The place, in three passes.
Big Cypress Bend Boardwalk is the southern entry into Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park, on the north side of the Tamiami Trail (US-41) about seven miles west of Everglades City. The boardwalk runs 2,500 feet straight into the strand and crosses a stand of bald cypress missed by the 1940s logging that cleared most of Big Cypress Swamp. The trail ends at an open slough with a long-occupied bald eagle nest. The strand itself stretches twenty miles north into Collier County and is among the largest cypress strands in the world.
The strand sits in still, humid air most of the year, holding moisture under the canopy long after the surrounding sawgrass dries out. The slough running beneath the boardwalk is a slow, shallow flow — a few inches deep in dry season, a foot or two after summer rain. Resurrection ferns ride the cypress trunks and turn from brown to green within hours of rainfall. Air-plant bromeliads and dozens of native orchid species inhabit the strand, including the ghost orchid, which blooms in late June and July.
The boardwalk is open from sunrise to sunset, with no entry fee and a small parking pull-off on US-41. The walk takes about an hour at observing pace. Mosquitoes are heavy from May through October and almost absent from December through March. Guided swamp walks into the deeper strand run from the Fakahatchee headquarters in Copeland during the dry season and require waders supplied by the park. Cell service is poor; the nearest gas and food are in Everglades City, ten minutes east.
