Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Mississippi Travelog #6
Foxworth, MS - Thursday, 26 Apr 2023, 1pm

Whew, this is getting long: three blogs now about Red Bluff canyon in Mississippi. And I'm going to stuff 6 pictures in this entry to get 'er done.

Once we climbed up through the creek at the bottom of the canyon our views opened up into this crazy, colorful badlands:



The bottom of the drainage was generally easily navigable. It was only going up the sides that would get steep. And going up one of the sides was what our trail map called for. We could see that trail— or, rather, we could see part of it. Another part of it had eroded away recently, leaving it impassable. So we explored various side canyons to see if there was another way out climbing up over the edge.



We had fun exploring around the bottom. The colors down here are so crazy. All the earth around us is dirt, BTW. Dirt in bright hues of yellow, orage, red, and even purple. Purple dirt!



Alas, we couldn't find a safe way up and out over the rim that wouldn't involve a lot of dangerous scrambling— on loose dirt, no less. Fortunately we had plenty of time this afternoon, having canceled redirected our previous plans so that all we have to do is get back to New Orleans tonight for a flight tomorrow. Thus we could explore all these canyons to our hearts' content and then retrace our route back out the bottom and climb back up the side of the hill.



Down below the canyon we walked along the railroad for about 100 meters from where the creek crossed it to where the trail back up the side began.

"Is this a live railroad line?" we wondered.

"Don't walk on the tracks; what if a train comes?" someone worried.

"Don't worry, if there's a train you'll hear it from a long way off," I responded.

Well, the answer to the first question is Yes, it's a live line. We heard a train approaching as we were about to start the ascent back up. We waited to see it— because, yes, we heard it long before it arrived. And surprisingly it was a Canadian train! That's sure far from home down here in southern Mississippi. (You can tell it's Canadian because of the CN emblem on the engine— Canadian National. And all the rail cars have "Sorry for the inconvenience" printed on them in English and French.)



Climbing back up the hill took some huffing and puffing. It seemed like it would take a long time but it didn't. The canyon isn't quite as deep as it looks from some angles. I don't think it took us more than about 15 minutes to get back up to the rim. And the views were beautiful.

Once back at the car we actually skipped opening the car and instead continued further around the rim toward the other side of the canyon. Up here there's a use trail that skirts around where the road has collapsed into the canyon and picks it up on the other side.



We got out to the remnants of the old road. It's actually the new old road.... The fragments here are from where they rebuilt the road further back after the original road fell into the canyon.

After checking out the views from the opposite side of the canyon we headed back to the car. At this point it was almost 1pm. We'd been hiking for almost 4 hours. That's twice as long as we expected to spend here. But the time spent has been so worth it! In beauty we walk.

Mississippi 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!

Mississippi Travelog #7
En route to New Orleans - Thursday, 26 Apr 2023, 2pm

We had an amazing hike at Red Bluff today in Mississippi. "Where's the blog with beautiful pictures?" you may ask. It's in my backlog. The workflow for those beautiful pictures takes more time than I have some days while still in the middle of a trip. Rather than let the whole blog series get jammed up behind them, I'm trying an approach on this trip of just working around them & posting them when I can, later. So, for now, just take my word that Red Bluff Canyon was stupendous, way better than we were expecting.

Update: Don't just take my word for it! I've now posted journal entries with pictures of the stunning Red Bluff canyon!

So, what's next? Completing our jaunt through Mississippi is what's next. Here's a map showing what we've done between yesterday and today:


After the hike at Red Bluff today we drove back to Columbia, MS for lunch. Even with a population under 6,000 (previous blog) it's the biggest town around for miles. From there we headed south toward New Orleans. We crossed the state line into Louisiana around 2pm, completing our jaunt through Mississippi in 26 hours.

How was it? Well, aside from the hikes, which I've detailed separately, Mississippi wasn't as bad as we feared. Remembering our trip to Arkansas a few years ago where Confederate flags and banners with racist language sprouted everywhere like the state flower— seriously, like half of all homes and businesses were displaying such flags— we thought it would be another place like that. In the southern parts of Mississippi visited over these 26 hours I didn't see a single Confederate flag. That's doubly surprising because Mississippi incorporated the Confederate battle flag as part of its state flag until a few years ago. People who want plausible deniability could fly the old state flag and say, "Naw, I ain't racist, I'm a proud Mississippian! ...New flag? I ain't made of money!"

Mississippi Travelog #2
Fort Adams, MS - Tuesday, 25 Apr 2023, 2:30pm

This first thing on our agenda for our brief trip into Mississippi, after taking a photo of the "Welcome to Mississippi" sign— which I'll not did not say "Welcome to..."— was to hike at Clark Creek Natural Area, one of Mississippi's state parks. It's not far across the border from Louisiana on the western side of the state. It was a 2½ hour drive up from New Orleans including a quick stop for lunch.



The entrance to the park is not particularly welcoming. It's on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, and there's a currently a chain link fence in front of the park entrance. It is open; you just have to park 50 meters away.

Once inside the not-welcome-to-Mississippi theme continues with the large number of regulatory signs at a kiosk next to the start of the trail. I guess those are necessary in states like Mississippi where "freedom" is understood as "the right to wreck things if it entertains me, other people be damned." For that matter I'm surprised there are no signs forbidding strip mining or dumping industrial waste in the creek. I mean, we're not that far out of Louisiana, where those are legal and practically considered business civil rights.

But hey, what about those waterfalls?



The first falls on the creek, beautifully named "First Waterfall", is a bit over ½ mile in from the trailhead. The trail is down hill virtually all the way... which means we'd pay on the return trek. We walked in the creek above the falls for the last bit before we reached the lip. There, there's a wooden staircase around the far left side that leads below the falls.

We thought about walking the creek down to the next falls, "Second Waterfall", but decided it might be better to take the marked trail. The marked trail goes up, up, up, then down, down, down to a spot a bit lower on the same creek.



As we arrived at Second Waterfall we noted that the creek above the falls is once again flat, and there's a wooden stair around the far side leading down.

On the trek back we walked the creek. Our feet got a bit wet, but we were prepared for that. And it's a warm day, so we didn't mind too much. Walking the creek between the two fall was so much easier than the official path.

There are more than two waterfalls in or near this park. According to maps there are nine. The others are much harder to reach, though, involving primitive trails and/or walk creeks through tough terrain. And trail notes from people who've been there say the first two are the best anyway.

We did try to visit one of these more remote falls. After slogging up over a hill then down the far side— it seems every leg of trail in this park requires going up then down again— we found the trail dropped down the side of a badly eroded hill about 50 feet tall. We decided not to risk injury going down that ravine.

Earlier today I wrote about canceling one beach trip in favor of another. It seems an easy call, right? Two trips now on the books, they seem redundant, so let's keep the better one and take back the time and money from the other. Unfortunately it's not as simple as that.

The difficulty is that I'm struggling to justify the whole rest of the trip beginning Friday now that Florida has been canceled. New Orleans, Mississippi, and Florida were like three legs of a tripod. Take one away, and the others don't stand well.

What do I care about in New Orleans? I'm not sure anymore. Carousing on Bourbon Street was amazing when I was in my 20s. Now, it's like, why do I need to pay exorbitant prices to drink overly sugared cheap booze on the street while party-goers throwing up in the gutters? I've got far better booze at home, far cheaper, and the only person I have to worry about throwing up on my own shoes is me. 🤣

What do I care about Mississippi? On an absolute scale, not much. It's a culturally backwards, politically authoritarian shit-hole. But it's also on my bucket list to visit all the states in the US. Mississippi is one of the last two.

We seriously considered pulling the plug on the whole trip. N.O. I wouldn't miss. Mississippi I'd be miffed about missing because of the bucket list thing. And frankly I'd be miffed about not traveling because then I wouldn't be taking time off. Remember, I'm on an "unlimited" time off policy at work now. There's no saving vacation days for later. They're effectively use-it-or-lose-it every few months.

We've considered going somewhere else instead on this trip. It's a great idea, but the problem is it's hard to book at reasonable prices only a week out. We explored a few ideas last night and decided it's not worth it. We've got one more idea we'll look at today. But most likely we'll just do 60% of our trip starting next week and I'll feel frustrated about the parts that are broken.