On Alligator Alley, Fla. ? You may have stopped at the rest area on Alligator Alley just north of Milemarker 62, gazed at the vast, cypress-dotted wilderness and thought, “Who, in his or her right mind, would try to walk around out in that?”

As it turns out, quite a few curious people — including me — have ventured there on foot. What you would be looking at is the 729,000-acre Big Cypress National Preserve, in which lies the southernmost portion of the 1,300-mile Florida Trail.

You should try hiking it sometime, but make sure you do it between late October and late April. Right now is prime time. Water levels are low; mosquitoes are dormant and air temperatures are comfortable.

Our group of nine from the Sierra Club Broward chapter, led by Kathleen Rhoad, embarked on a nine-mile, round-trip hike that began at the entrance gate on the north side of I-75 and wound through cypress sloughs, oak hammocks and sawgrass prairies before returning to the rest area parking lot.

Not only was our walk scenic, but we lost the traffic noise from the Interstate only a couple of miles into the swamp.

Wildlife-watching opportunities began almost as soon as we hit Noble Road, a former railroad bed used by loggers who harvested the valuable trees before the area was designated a preserve in 1974.

The canal that runs parallel to the old road held alligators, large slider turtles and passing wood storks, herons, ibis and kingfishers.

At just more than a mile, we came to a double blaze — two orange paint spots on a tree that directed us to turn right onto a more primitive trail. Rhoad said the intersection was the former homesite of a pig farm, and indeed, a wooden cross bearing the name “Cocoa Piggy” marked the turn.

That this trail is passable is due to the work of the Happy Hoofers, the Broward chapter of the Florida Trail Association who cleared the path in 1998.

For the next couple of miles, we passed under tall cabbage palms, slogged through a cypress slough and saw an old, fallen hunter’s treestand.

The clattering noise our hiking boots made on the fallen palmetto branches scared off most forms of wildlife long before we could see them. But we saw plenty of evidence they had been there recently: scat piles (the polite term for animal waste), deer hoofprints, rooted-up mud from the snouts of wild hogs and the wings and bare skull of an anhinga.

Speculation on the murder suspect (gator, panther, or black bear?) occupied us for most of the way to our lunch spot — about three miles down the trail.

The lunch spot was a dry prairie called “Carpenter Camp” for Ken Carpenter of Fort Lauderdale, the late Florida Trail coordinator who was instrumental in establishing the 65-mile section running from Alligator Alley to Lake Okeechobee.

After lunches and water, we continued north through the prairie over a mud footbridge dotted with animal tracks. We tromped through a palmetto thicket, stopped at a fence line at about four miles, then headed back the way we came.

Rhoad, an experienced hiker and Sierra Club outings leader, declared the section of Big Cypress trail we covered the most beautiful.

Although it was my first hike in the region, I couldn’t disagree.