Mile 668.0 - RB (a view of) Crowley’s Ridge D

668 RB (a view of) Crowley’s Ridge D

As you are approaching the top end of Buck Island you will be welcomed to the area with a grand view of Crowley’s Ridge. Helena is located at the Southern end of Crowley’s Ridge, “Where the Ridge meets the River” (still 7 miles downstream). Crowley’s Ridge is something of a geographic anomaly in an otherwise pancake flat floodplain. In geologic history the Mississippi once flowed on the other side of the ridge, the western side, and the Ohio commanded the eastern. They didn’t meet until downstream somewhere near present-day Vicksburg. St. Francis National Forest, the smallest forest in the National Forest system, straddles the last 30 miles of the ridge, and protects this strange landscape of steep ridges and viney tangled bottoms. Crowley’s Ridge runs north all the way up to the Missouri Ozarks, and provides high ground for the cities Marianna, Forest City and Jonesboro; and for the paddler significantly so at its southern terminus where sits the happy & dry city of Helena (as described more in full below)