Mile 869.0 - LBD Sheep’s Ridge Break

John Ruskey

20 Apr 2026 � 1 min read

869 LBD Sheep’s Ridge Break

In the 2011 flood the Mississippi River almost carved a new path across the backside of old Is. No 13, which would have turned Little Cypress Bend into an oxbow lake and made a new channel for the big river to follow. Engineers believe this would have definitely occurred had the river stayed high longer than it did. After passing Tiptonville you might notice a bright stretch of the riverbank on the right near mile 869 RBD. The Army Corps had to go into overdrive with their rip-rap operations to refill the deep hole made in the muddy bank. The water dove a hundred feet deep here and scoured out a blue hole still intact, 4,000 feet long and 1,000 feet wide, with another big blue hole next to it. Check it out on Google earth. You can still see vast landscape of sand that was thrown out over all of the fields. Many thousands of acres of fertile fields and some roads were lost to the flood, and thousands of animals, but fortunately no human lives.

The Alaska Light was destroyed in the 2011 flood and never replaced. It is named for a steamboat that sank in this area more than 100 years ago. Colonel Suter's map of 1874 showed the steamer Alaska lying on the edge of a sandbar in the snag-filled channel above Island No. 13. (Braggs: Historic Names & Places)

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