Mile 18.0 - Miles 18-17: RBD Thompson Towhead

John Ruskey

20 Apr 2026 � 1 min read

18 - 17 RBD Thompson Towhead

There never seem to be good landings along the steep muddy rip-rap banks right bank descending from mile 20 to mile 18, maybe a few sandy bluff purchases in high water, and at low and medium water a lot of slimy muddy flats seem to accumulate around the bend below Thompson Towhead. On the other hand, in high water you might want to dive hard right into the woods at mile 18 RBD and enjoy a short back channel chute through thick willow forests. Sometimes a beautiful sandy landing emerges after high water at the bottom end of this chute (near RBD 17) that would make for a terrific stopping place. In low water you might find open sand on extremity of bar, which is a graveyard of steamboat wrecks.

As you come around Dogtooth Bend, and then Greenleaf Bend (two of my favorites in the entire Mississippi River river basin), you are afforded your first views downstream of the Kentucky Hills rising slightly above the bottomland hardwood forests, the evidence of previous high water flows in the massive piles of driftwood pushed against the edges, in some places an unbroken tangle of jumbled logs & branches woven tightly by the mighty Middle Mississippi, like some giant sheep herder’s fence line, all of the rocks & wing dams ravaged by the current, (in 2014) some rock work now in progress at the end of Greenleaf, a rock barge & crane & tow anchored and huffing away loudly & laboriously, the landscape sliding by.

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