EVERGLADES FIRE! The Everglades has been burnt millions of times before it was urbanized. Now the problem is that the plants in this ecosystem need to be burnt on occasion as it is a part of their life cycle. People originally didn’t want any fire to last around them. However, as we soon started to figure out, if you don’t let anything in your environment burn for a while, and a burn occurs naturally, there will be no stopping it. All the dead leaves, twigs and plant debris that have been building up over the years will catch fire quickly and the fire will become monstrous. Humans again making the problem worse by trying to fix it, how ironic. Slash Pines actually can be completely burned and charred, and will still grow back, even healthier than they were before! Fire brings nutrients to the soil and clears the dead and dying for a new generation to come about. I took this photo in the middle of the day. There we were just hiking out in the pine rock land woods of the dry western Everglades habitat looking for rattlesnakes and…boom! A giant fire came out of nowhere with smoke so dark and high it was like out of a movie. There was so much dark smoke in the sky, it felt like I was watching a solar eclipse.