Mile 680.5 — Whiskey Chute/Walnut Bend

The main channel slows down momentarily as it exits Mhoon Bend and slides into Whiskey Chute where the banks open up to almost a mile wide.  It’s a lovely piece of river with tall trees on either side.   Your best route of descent is staying with the current left bank past a series of dikes at the top end LBD of Walnut Bend.   At low water pristine pools (blue holes) of clear water are formed in the downstream side of the topmost dikes.   Sometimes these blue holes grow to the size of an Olympic swim pool, and are filled with delightful dancing blueish/greenish water.  Other times they become diminished with murky green-black water and mud slip bottoms inhabited by turtles and minnows and who knows what else.  As you get deep in the bend you can hug the inside LBD and cut the corner (where excellent low/med water camping can be found, but none at high water).  Or you can go wide with the fastest water, and get the slingshot treatment as the river pushes you outwards with centrifugal force and you quickly find yourself on the opposite shore.  Not a good time or place to meet an upstream towboat!  The turbulent waters here are known to respond exponentially with the passage of upstream tows.  I remember paddling with a Chattahoochee River guide in one of my big 26 foot long voyageur canoes into some choppy tall waves being ejected in the outwash of a big upriver tow at this place.  This guide is a friend of mine and he still laughs at the experience.  He was not expecting waves on the Mississippi.  The 3-screw tow passed up into Walnut Bend and on purpose we entered the wave train skyrocketing downstream behind his tail in a series of tall standing waves that were more tight than usual in formation.  Some of the waves were breaking by the time we got to the highest and darkest swells in this series.  My friend’s eyes got big.  And then he stopped paddling, maybe out of some reflex of self-preservation.  In shock he put his paddle down and held onto the gunnels of the canoe as the bow rose six, seven, maybe eight feet above the stern, and then clapped downwards with a mighty splash that rolled over the waist of the bow paddler and wetted the first three rows of paddlers behind.  It was my friend’s first time on the Mississippi and he has been hooked since! 

At higher water levels you can stay right bank descending into Walnut Bend and duck behind a small isolated island built up within the Walnut Bend Dikes near RBD 681.  After sliding back out of this short channel you will be less than a mile from the St. Francis River, which has meandered into the vicinity of the big river, and then meanders outward, and continues on curving downstream another 21 miles before its junction with the mother Mississippi (only 7 miles by the big river).  You might want to make a landing here and walk through the woods and climb to the top of the levee and see the sluggish St. Francis beyond over some fields.  Along the way you will walk through several depressions in the forest floor.  These low places are the remnants of some geomorphologic shaping that occurred when the Mississippi tried to jump channel and make a new confluence of the St. Francis River during the Great Flood of 1927 (known as the Whitehall Crevasse).  It makes for an interesting side trip, but be sure to secure your canoe or kayak well above wave splash height along the bank before doing so, especially at low water when the passing tows will slam it against the sharp stones of the rip-rap.