atchafalaya-river

Mile 0.1 LBD — Three Rivers Landing

John Ruskey

26 Apr 2026 � 1 min read

A nice sandbar emerges at low/med water at the downstream side of the mouth of the Lower Old River Channel, opposite the Junction Three River Light. Excellent picnic site, especially after paddling through the stillwater canal. Stop here and celebrate your first view of the Red, the Atchafalaya, and the Canal. At one time the canal was full of flowing water. This could make a good campsite, but is is ATV accessible, and is a popular fishing spot. As the water rises, the sandbar disappears. You can find good camping up to bank full on the grassy hummocks on top of the riverbank, but beware fire ants. The riverbank is thick with fire ant colonies. A conspicuous stand of Chinaberry trees line the river below here. Dewberries are thick along the river banks here and further downstream, to Krotz Springs.

Accompanying the agricultural fields and farm houses over the levee, there seems to be a lot of bankside trash along this stretch of river. From our expedition journals: Monday, March 16, 2015: Man’s bankside works are ant-like busy and ugly and survivalist. Good intentions turn too easily into mean lives. Maybe it’s only because I am one of their kind so I feel it too. But almost everywhere man’s bankside trash heaps bother my aesthetics. And every time nature’s expressions are full of beauty and elegance. Even the ragged weedy places with wind-ravaged trees falling into the river and getting tumbled roots, broken branches, mud, sand and grass rotating and tossed and piled into chaotic piles. Even there beauty is seen and felt there. Dewberries thick along the Atchafalaya, a stretch of Chinaberries, stand of big trees, but their upper section is mostly cut, broken over, or recovering. It’s the same bottomland hardwood forests as seen on the Mississippi, but red mud instead of black, and more people living close by. Similar to the Mississippi above Minneapolis: people living close to the land, and part of it, not passers by.

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