(gentle orchestral music)
- [Mallory] My family's been here
for six or seven generations.
I had this experience as a kid driving around
with my parents who would always say,
when I was your age, that was an orange grove.
They would point to some new housing development
and tell me about the grove or the pinewoods
that used to exist there.
35 years later, I've become that person.
(cheerful strumming music)
♪ In the night while my body slept in my bed ♪
This track is basically unknown.
♪ My mind was running through the woods instead ♪
- [Man] GPS, binoculars, sitting right here.
- [Man] I'll get it.
♪ Vagabond dreaming takes me through the night ♪
♪ Sipping whiskey by the river ♪
- [Joe] What makes this so cool is really being
explorers again.
♪ 100 miles an hour in the fast lane ♪
♪ 100 miles an hour toward the light ♪
- [Carlton] We know the boundaries of this green ribbon,
but there's not a hiking trail,
there's not a paddling trail.
♪ See the curve in that river's bend ♪
♪ And I look at you and I see my friend ♪
♪ 100 miles an hour in the fast lane ♪
♪ 100 miles an hour til the end ♪
♪ Yip ♪
(energetic strumming music)
It's gonna be a suffer fest for a few days here.
- [Man] Holy (beeps).
- I can't think of any better people to suffer with.
We've already spent a couple hundred days together
on expeditions.
- Little bit sketchy.
- Come up and just falling the river.
- Joining me right now, we have Joe Guthry
and Mallory Lykes-Dimmitt.
Holy smokes, you're back and you're alive.
- We trekked for 70 straight days across
all of Northwest Florida to the Alabama boarder.
- [Man] When this expedition came up,
I was immediately up for it.
We're gonna travel up Reedy Creek,
the last best connection between
two of the state's most important swamps.
(gentle piano music)
(sloshing)
- Reedy Creek has been getting narrower and narrower
and at least to this point,
it seems like it's run out of water.
Good thing we switched to hiking.
- [Mallory] Is this corridor even viable for larger animals?
We know that a black bear has made its way here,
but was unable to cross I-4.
- [Man] M34 was a young male bear.
He made it to Celebration right south of I-4.
We spent a couple of days searching along the highway
and you can see from the GPS tracks,
he marched up and down the highway in the dark
looking for a place to get across and couldn't find it.
We'll be overlapping where his tracks took him.
I can imagine M34 having much the same experience
traveling in these narrow strands of swamp
and scrub and here and all around him,
the noises of suburbia.
In so many ways, this trip is trying to demonstrate
that there still a connection possible.
This does look like a bobcat.
- [Mallory] We'll be looking at tracks.
We'll be noticing all sorts of signs
and keeping a species list.
(birds chirping)
- We're looking pretty good now.
(zipping)
(birds chirping) (quiet gentle music)
This is the way my granddad used to do it.
Cut the bottom open.
(slurping)
Not bad.
This is the first water of any depth we've seen
in more than a day.
Here we are at the edge of Reedy Creek,
headwaters of the Everglades.
There's Lowe's and Home Improvement
and the place we're standing now might be
the most narrow pinched off part
of the Florida Wildlife Corridor.
And you can hear dogs barking on one side
and cars on both.
You know, to be standing in the middle,
that means you're not more than 200 yards from the edge.
And here it's just a fragile green thread.
(quiet gentle music)
The pace of change is so fast,
our Google satellite imagery that we use
to plan the route is already out of date.
It doesn't show the brand new sub-divisions
and the brand new roads that are going in.
There's been tremendous change to this region
in the past five decades.
Since the day Disney came here,
there were still 50 different ways
a bear or panther could travel through this region.
- Here in Florida, we have something special
we never enjoyed at Disneyland,
a blessing of size.
There's enough land here to hold all the ideas and plans
we could possibly imagine.
- [Joe] 50 years ago, Orlando was a very small town.
The population just growing and pushing,
it's really not that different in Tampa,
Naples, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach.
Florida continues to grow by 1000 people per day.
- [Carlton] Where'd Mal now go?
- Right here.
- You guys movin'?
So easy to get separated in here.
- [Joe] Hey Carlton?
- Can't even see him.
Woo, where are you guys?
A swamp can be a disorienting place.
- [Mallory] You're sweating like crazy
and we're crawling up and over
basically armpit high vegetation
and everything you touch could be Poison Ivy.
Right now, even though it's maybe the most suffering for us,
this is pretty wild here.
- See it move just then?
It's a little above your eye level.
- [Mallory] When you get into places like this,
you really start to become attuned to the landscape
every step that you take and the more time you spend,
the more it sort of opens up to you.
(gentle orchestral music)
- This flat back here isn't terrible.
It is a lot of Poison Ivy.
- It's a great place to be able to sit
and eat breakfast.
- [Carlton] Hey, on the move again, on the move again,
keep your eyes on it.
- [Joe] That's your tent spot.
Okay.
Mallory and Carlton are like family to me.
You look for any opportunity you can
to reaffirm your commitment to your friends
and to your people.
- [Man] Yeah baby.
- Life is much more simplified.
It's like a good sleeping bag,
the ability to boil water and have a simple
cup of coffee in a place where
not what most people consider hospitable or fun.
It's just nice knowing that you're gonna
make a little space for for them to eat comfortable,
fixing a little meal, keep yourself going.
Yeah, I love this swamp.
(gentle orchestral music)
(humming traffic)
- We'll be paddling up to something that
is going to cross this entire creek landscape
and you can already hear the noise from it.
We're still a good 1/2 mile away.
(humming traffic)
- [man] When you get close to one of the those highways,
having come from a place of relative calm, you recoil.
(humming traffic)
- [Mallory] We know from telemetry data that wildlife
will approach the road and hear that noise
and will turn back and will not be able to connect
to the other populations on the other side of the road.
- [man] We met up with Jen Corn.
- [Jen] Looks like y'all been having a rough time.
- [Man] One of the state's panther biologists.
- One of the goals of setting cameras under here is
you know, are wildlife using it as it is?
What are some really simple things
could they possibly do?
Cats do get across I-4 occasionally.
One cat made it to Southern Georgia
and that cat's DNA showed that he came from South Florida.
So they are capable of making those distances.
(quiet orchestral music)
- [Man] We learned that two Florida panthers
were being killed by vehicles within a quarter mile
of that crossing.
(humming traffic)
- Some people that I've come across think
it's just a lost cause, like I-4 is just
a barrier we're never going to be able
to do anything about for wildlife
and I don't think that's the case at all.
I think that there is still 100% chance
to make this more permeable for wildlife.
- [Man] For a panther to be born 100's of miles away
in South Florida, to get hit by a car here
on the edge of Orlando, it tells you
this wildlife corridor is still working.
It also shows you exactly what's wrong with it.
This region has gone from a place
where all manner of wildlife had room to roam
to what is fast becoming a hard barrier
that could potentially cut the state of Florida in half.
(gentle orchestral music)
- [Mallory] I think it's hard to recognize the loss
while it's happening and we're really good at
recognizing that loss when it's too late.
(gentle orchestral music)
(sloshing)
- It is literally one step at a time
for the first 4 1/2 days of hiking.
So it's been a real treat to get on the water here
and actually be able to get a little bit of glide
with a stroke and think about
where we are and what we're doing and
still blows my mind that we're sitting here
in this gorgeous floodplain forest
listening to the sounds of the Disney theme park
just a mile or so off to the right.
(cheerful orchestral music)
(splashing)
(birds chirping)
- Something's going down the creek below us.
- Great Blue Heron, no?
That's what I thought it was gonna be from a distance.
- [Carlton] Going off to the side and it landed.
- [Mallory] Yep.
- The Limpkin was hanging out on that limb
that's out over the water for the longest time.
(birds chirping)
- I can hear the tourists less than a mile over there
on a ride through Disney's Animal Kingdom,
probably looking at lions and giraffes
and all sorts of other things with no idea that
this is happening right here.
(helicopter humming)
(cheerful strumming music)
♪ Oh ♪
- [Man] It's just crazy, the two different Florida's
that exist out there.
♪ You got me walking 10 miles high ♪
- I think what we all have to do
is sort of be able to walk in both of those worlds
and that's very representative of the corridor.
We're trying to show that you can actually
balance development and wildlife habitat,
but that we have to plan in order to make that happen.
♪ See if I can fly ♪
- [Carlton] The corridor is really hiding in plain sight
and that's what this is about.
We've got to keep this last best connection
between the green swamp and the Everglades.
- [Joe] And we keep developing without corridors,
is gonna cut off all of that conservation legacy
from the rest of Florida and from the rest of America.
And that's what we're fighting for.
(gentle strumming music)
♪ My best guess ♪
♪ Is too far off ♪
♪ And in my chest ♪
What I want to tell Floridians,
what I want to tell the world,
is that wild Florida is still here.
It still exists.
It still has a chance to be saved.
Woo.
♪ I sit alone ♪
In the waters of the green swamp.
♪ In an empty house, writing notes ♪
♪ While I'm thinking about, the few folks ♪
♪ I didn't let down ♪
♪ Ohhhh ♪
♪ You got me walking 10 miles high ♪
♪ Ohhhh ♪
(gentle orchestral music)