Mile 44.0 - LBD Mardi Gras Pass

44 LBD Mardi Gras Pass

Four miles to Law Bay. First of the many exits to the Gulf of Mexico. Good flow at all water levels. Superlative birding and wildlife viewing.

Mardi Gras Pass leads to Back Levee Canal and Bayou Law, quickest route to Gulf

Follow Bayou Law to reach

• Law Bay
• America Bay
• Bay Crabe
• Breton Sound

Back Levee Canal also leads to

• William Boyles Bayou
• John Bayou
• Spillway Bayou

A gentle paddle down Mardi Gras Pass and into the Back Levee Canal and then down Law Bayou will bring you to endless grassy marshes (two miles from the main channel Mississippi). Paddle another two miles into Law Bay to reach the open waters of the ocean. Technically you will have followed the muddy Mississippi to the salty waters of the Gulf of Mexico. You could call your expedition complete and no one could second guess your decision. But this could also be a great side trip. Even if you are not ending your expedition here, this would make for a wonderful side trip to get an advance inspection of the extensive marshlands found on either side of the river from here on down. Another good reason for this side trip: for a close-up view of the wildlife you are not seeing while paddling down the middle of the big river! The final ridges of dry ground provide excellent habitat for wild pigs who roam freely and rule this landscape. Also thick with hornets and wasps. Be very wary around the few remaining trees for hornet and wasp nests.

How did Mardi Gras Pass get its Name?

Strange things happen on Mardi Gras day. People transform. Hair suddenly grows, turns blue or pink, and trumpets blare. Wild sides bust loose from places that we never knew existed. On a chilly Mardi Gras day in 2012, the Mississippi River was the one to bust loose and show its wild side. Pressure had been mounting at Bohemia Spillway, about 35 miles south of New Orleans, with months of overtopping from the record high waters of the 2011 flood. Across the banks, the water began scouring a channel across a road and through the wetlands beyond. The channel grew progressively deeper until the only thing that separated the river from the wetlands was a spit of willow-topped mud. Water pushed, and the mud grew more and more narrow, until the tiny divider sloughed off and joined the mud of the rest of the continent. It’s the first time in several decades that the Mississippi River has created a new distributary channel to the sea, according to advocates with the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation.

Coastal advocates see Mardi Gras Pass, as it’s come to be known, as a natural way to reconnect the river to its estranged marshes. Since the dawn of our modern levee system in the 30’s, more and more salt water has crept into those marshes. It’s thrown off the delicate brackish balance, killed off vegetation, and carried off roughly 1900 square miles of Louisiana’s coast. That’s the size of the state of Delaware. Like most of Louisiana’s freshwater-starved wetlands, the wetlands area beyond Mardi Grass Pass, called Bohemia Spillway, needs the Mississippi River to stay alive. Scientists with the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation had been monitoring the spillway for years, and they’ve already seen new shoals of land forming in the wetlands beyond the pass. They’ve called the break “exceptionally rare and highly valuable,” because, with the river all leveed-up, scientists almost never have the opportunity to document the river as its wild-flowing self. But even in this remote, unpopulated area of the Louisiana, humans have taken issue with a wild-flowing river. The Lake Ponchartrain Basin Foundation has had to fight to keep Mardis Gras Pass flowing. When the water washed away the bank, it also washed out a road, and the oil company that uses the road wants it back. Shortly after the crevasse formed, the company filed a permit to have it closed.

In addition, the State is wary of a rogue river channel that might keep growing and eventually alter the navigation routes or hinder flood control operations. They had already spent millions figuring out how to walk a thin line that balances our own needs and the needs of the river. After analyzing hydrological regimes, sediment transport capacities, salinity patterns, water level fluctuations, vegetation changes, fisheries impacts, and other variables, the master plan for the coast has settled on a strategic series of diversion structures that attempt to reestablish deltaic processes along the river. One such structure was planned for a place only miles from Mardi Gras Pass. Coastal Advocates argued the river had done for free what the state planned to do for $220,000,000. And eventually, the LPBF, the state’s coastal czar, and the oil company eventually found compromise, not so surprisingly, in a bridge. If all goes as planned, fresh river water will keep flowing beneath it.

In May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) coastal survey office announced that 31 place names in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, would be wiped from the map. Bigger bodies of water have washed away the strips of marshy land that once bounded these places, turning them into blobs of salt water, and NOAA will no longer publish the names on new surveys. They’re elegant, even romantic names like Bay Pomme d’Or and Bayou Auguste: gone to the archives. Gone, too, are the stories of how these places got their names. What beast was killed and how great a flock of birds were feeding on it for a place to get a name like Grand Bayou Carrion Crow? Mardi Gras Pass is different. In real time, we get to watch its name unfold before our eyes. Fishermen have made good use of the pass, and the name has caught on. (“Where yall headed?” “Back through Mardi Gras.”) And the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development just announced it will propose “Mardis Gras Pass” to the US Board of Geographical Names as a new Louisiana Geographic Feature proposal. One name at a time, the coast can still grow. (Wolf E. Staudinger)