Mile 423.0 - Diamond Cut-Off

423 Diamond Cut-Off

Below LeTourneau the canoeist or kayaker enters a five mile southerly stretch and then rounds a right angle bend at Newtown which resolves itself in a northwesterly direction. What was previously a tail wind becomes a side wind or head wind, and vice versa. After all the industrial commotion below Vicksburg Newtown Bend is a welcome return to the wild feel of the Lower Mississippi River with big woods on either side and no sign of mankind save passing tows. The woods are about 15 miles deep to your west over Davis Island, Palmyra Lake and over to the levee on the Louisiana side. They are about 5 miles deep in the floodplain on the Mississippi side. Which means the river here is flowing through a bottomland hardwood forest twenty miles wide! The water here gurgles into and out of numerous sloughs, back channels, side channels old channels and run outs, creating a watery landscape that is constantly filtering and rejuvenating the big river in the way the floodplain was meant to do. At flood stage most of the forest will be standing in water. During the flood of 2011 there was a steady flow throughout all of these woods, and strong flows through all the back channels. No dry land was found in between the Louisiana levee and Highway 61.

Says Braggs: “Diamond Cutoff was the first artificial cutoff constructed by the Corps of Engineers in the 1930's. There had already been several natural cutoffs in the area, and engineers believed that the river was about to create another at Diamond Island. To forestall the natural cutoff, the engineers began the construction of the artificial channel which was designed to keep the river channel in a more desirable alignment than the river itself might have chosen.”