Red Bluff Canyon
May. 7th, 2023 01:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerMississippi Travelog #4
Foxworth, MS - Thursday, 26 Apr 2023, 10am
The way we wound up in the little burg of Foxworth, MS, to hike at a place called Red Bluff is both curious and straightforward. Curious, because it's easy to wonder, "Why are we here, of all places?" Straightforward, because the process by which we chose this place was we 1) decided we'd take a jaunt through Mississippi off a trip to New Orleans (visiting MS is bucket list item), 2) Googled "best hikes in Mississippi" or something obvious like that, and 3) picked this among the top hits after looking at pictures and checking the location.
It helped that both this and our other choice of places to hike, the waterfalls at Clark Creek Natural Area (yesterday's hike), are both in southern Mississippi. That made it possible for us to visit both on a driving loop from New Orleans, with an overnight stay in Columbia, MS last night. From Columbia it was an easy drive over here this morning, barely more than 20 minutes on country roads outside the small town.
As we drove out to the trailhead we wondered what we were really getting into. ...No, we weren't worried we'd be in over our heads. Quite to the contrary: we worried we'd been snookered by colorfully retouched pictures and forced perspective photography into believing that this "Grand Canyon of Mississippi" was anything more than an overgrown drainage ditch. Indeed as we navigated to the end of a narrow paved road in the middle of nowhere we even wondered if we hadn't been led on an elaborate snipe hunt. But we parked the car in front of where gravel berms blocked the road, grabbed our cameras, and hoofed over the berms to see what lay beyond.
It... did not disappoint.
This is just a view of the upper part of Red Bluff Canyon. It's been formed by erosion, revealing the natural and very colorful dirt making up Red Bluff, a natural rise above the Pearl River in southern Mississippi.
What you're seeing with the crumbled bit of road at the bottom of the frame (above) is that the fast growing canyon has undercut a road in the area. In fact this part of road was already rebuilt farther back from the edge of the canyon many years ago. The canyon is growing fast enough that it's wrecked the second road already. You can see bits of the road hanging over the canyon halfway up the right side of the frame, too.
There was no obvious safe way down into the canyon from the road's abrupt end so we went back to the car to lace up our boots and explore out on a dirt road forking off to the left. After a short bit we arrived at a cliff atop the canyon with wider-ranging views.
We walked along this cliff edge for a bit, scoping where there were various ways down into the canyon. We totally intended to get down into the canyon. Every written guide we'd checked described doing so, though not exactly how. We figured there had to be a trail. ...And a better trail than the very steep and now half washed out one we saw dropping precipitously from the cliff.
Cue the AllTrails app. It's an app/website I've started using in the past year for looking up details on hikes. While its driving directions to this hike were not exactly great, its depiction of the trail route on a topographic map was useful. It confirmed that a faint trail we saw off to the left was the proper way to go. It climbed down the side of the bluff, avoiding the steepness of going straight over the edge. Though it did indicate that the trail would be a loop, with the return path coming straight up the cliff edge! Yeah, even the best written guides have to be field checked regularly.
More to come....
UPDATE: keep reading in part 2!
Foxworth, MS - Thursday, 26 Apr 2023, 10am
The way we wound up in the little burg of Foxworth, MS, to hike at a place called Red Bluff is both curious and straightforward. Curious, because it's easy to wonder, "Why are we here, of all places?" Straightforward, because the process by which we chose this place was we 1) decided we'd take a jaunt through Mississippi off a trip to New Orleans (visiting MS is bucket list item), 2) Googled "best hikes in Mississippi" or something obvious like that, and 3) picked this among the top hits after looking at pictures and checking the location.
It helped that both this and our other choice of places to hike, the waterfalls at Clark Creek Natural Area (yesterday's hike), are both in southern Mississippi. That made it possible for us to visit both on a driving loop from New Orleans, with an overnight stay in Columbia, MS last night. From Columbia it was an easy drive over here this morning, barely more than 20 minutes on country roads outside the small town.
As we drove out to the trailhead we wondered what we were really getting into. ...No, we weren't worried we'd be in over our heads. Quite to the contrary: we worried we'd been snookered by colorfully retouched pictures and forced perspective photography into believing that this "Grand Canyon of Mississippi" was anything more than an overgrown drainage ditch. Indeed as we navigated to the end of a narrow paved road in the middle of nowhere we even wondered if we hadn't been led on an elaborate snipe hunt. But we parked the car in front of where gravel berms blocked the road, grabbed our cameras, and hoofed over the berms to see what lay beyond.
It... did not disappoint.
This is just a view of the upper part of Red Bluff Canyon. It's been formed by erosion, revealing the natural and very colorful dirt making up Red Bluff, a natural rise above the Pearl River in southern Mississippi.
What you're seeing with the crumbled bit of road at the bottom of the frame (above) is that the fast growing canyon has undercut a road in the area. In fact this part of road was already rebuilt farther back from the edge of the canyon many years ago. The canyon is growing fast enough that it's wrecked the second road already. You can see bits of the road hanging over the canyon halfway up the right side of the frame, too.
There was no obvious safe way down into the canyon from the road's abrupt end so we went back to the car to lace up our boots and explore out on a dirt road forking off to the left. After a short bit we arrived at a cliff atop the canyon with wider-ranging views.
We walked along this cliff edge for a bit, scoping where there were various ways down into the canyon. We totally intended to get down into the canyon. Every written guide we'd checked described doing so, though not exactly how. We figured there had to be a trail. ...And a better trail than the very steep and now half washed out one we saw dropping precipitously from the cliff.
Cue the AllTrails app. It's an app/website I've started using in the past year for looking up details on hikes. While its driving directions to this hike were not exactly great, its depiction of the trail route on a topographic map was useful. It confirmed that a faint trail we saw off to the left was the proper way to go. It climbed down the side of the bluff, avoiding the steepness of going straight over the edge. Though it did indicate that the trail would be a loop, with the return path coming straight up the cliff edge! Yeah, even the best written guides have to be field checked regularly.
More to come....
UPDATE: keep reading in part 2!
