Mile 151.8 - RBD Herculaneum

John Ruskey

20 Apr 2026 � 1 min read

151.8 RBD Herculaneum

Industrious Herculaneum is not very inviting from the river. A busy lead mill is one of its highlights. But opposite the town is a series of small sandbars (one behind each wing dam) that at low/med water levels make for good picnicking and possible camping. While it might be noisy, the views of the bluffs are beautiful upstream and down, punctuated here and there by towers and smokestacks, and behind you is the sprawling Foster (or Meissner) Island, which is a giant flood-prone alluvial forest, a small piece of the American Bottom and a segment of the Middle Mississippi NWR.

You are entering one of the most beautiful stretches of the Middle Miss, leaving suburban St. Louis behind, the towns retreating further back, the bluffs getting taller, and the islands bigger and bigger. This region is sometimes referred to as the Mississippi River Hills. For the paddler you can enjoy the sensation of floating through the cliffy bluffs of the Missouri Ozarks as sculpted by the wind, the water and the ceaseless scouring of the Mississippi River, the morphology of the floodplain defined by the last major flooding of the last ice age, a broad valley shaped violently and then left to dry out and be richly vegetated & grazed and then populated as mankind grew and adapted and became one with the land. Beautiful bluffs, rising forests and steep ravines, old houses and old institutions, Catholics & industry, power plants, lead smelter (Herculaneum), concrete yards, limestone quarries where the bluffs being pulverized and pushed elsewhere to be converted into roadbeds, dikes & harbors, the forest predominates over the ridges. Bald eagles swing into view and the glide over the tops of the bluffs while raccoons and squirrels forage through the woods, and beavers and river otters populate the banks along with countless varieties of turtles and snakes.

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