Mile 954.5 - Ohio/Middle Miss River Confluence:

954.5 Ohio/Middle Miss River Confluence:

Start of the Lower Mississippi River

Paddlers, welcome to the Lower Mississippi River! The Ohio River on the average delivers twice as much water to this point than the Mississippi. Which means you are now on the biggest volume river in North America, which is pretty awesome when you consider all of the big rivers there are winding and writhing their way across this continent, including the biggies like the Yukon, the McKenzie, and the St. Lawrence.

If you combined all of the rivers of Canada you would come up with a bigger river. If you combined all of the glacier-melt torrents of Alaska the same, it would b a bigger river. But the Mississippi beats out all other rivers by the sheer reach of its basin. In the forest the biggest tree that has the most branches with the most twigs is going to receive the most sunlight. In similar fashion the biggest river will have the most tributaries. All of the branches and twigs of the giant main trunk of the Lower Mississippi reach out all over this country and catch more rain drops and melting snow flakes than any other. The catchment basin it’s called. And the Mississippi is endowed with one of the biggest. Only the Amazon has a bigger one. Maybe the Congo. If you combine all of the streams and creeks and coulees and rivulets and seeps and wetland runoffs across a big enough area, in fact across two thousand miles from the Northern Rockies to the Alleghenies, well eventually you’re going to come up with a big volume flow that exceeds all of the others. So like many things in life, it’s all a matter of who you know and how well-connected you are.

The one-and-one-half mile wide confluence is often quoted as the natural widest place on the entire Mississippi River, which makes sense, this is the biggest and most important confluence out of any of them, and the two rivers run side by side before joining, deepening, narrowing. But as result of personal observation it seems like the Arkansas River confluence (374 miles downstream) is just as wide. And some of the places below or above some of the big islands, like Choctaw Island, or even Wolf Island (which is the first big island downstream from here) are just as wide, or wider. Of course, with all things Mississippi, everything has to do with river level. In the great flood of 2011 there were places where the river was five miles wide levee to levee, that is including all of the water flowing through the woods over completely flooded islands. But maybe at low water this is the natural widest place. All facts are subject to perspective on the river, kind of like space travel.

Photographer Charles Dee Sharp documented the river in 1953, noting the big changes you feel entering the kingdom of the Lower Mississippi:

“Below St. Louis the geography changes; below Cairo it changes utterly. It’s a transcendent, timeless realm. There is an elemental awe about it. Everything human disappears in the riverscape. Emotions are affected, discomfited, made ambiguous. The horizon is empty, limitless. You are an irrelevant nothing in a watery wilderness. Through crazed boils and whirlpools [you] move upon the brown mass of water”

The Kentucky Hills (Loess Bluffs)

Most of western Kentucky lies on a series of bluffs which sharply define the eastern boundary of the Mississippi River Valley past the confluence with the Ohio River. The Mississippi River runs right up against the Kentucky bluffs rather than meandering through the alluvial plain of the Mississippi Embayment in the Missouri Bootheel. Because the confluence of the two rivers doubles the volume of the Mississippi River towns south of Cairo no longer are located on the riverbank but are situated on or in between high bluffs, for example Wickliffe, Columbus, Hickman, Randolph, Memphis, Vicksburg, Natchez and St. Francisville. As an aid to navigation and understanding of the bluffs the Rivergator has numbered the Kentucky Loess bluffs in descending order, similar to the Chickasaw Bluffs further downstream in Tennessee. These are numbered according to where the river runs against the bank and makes a raw cut into the bluff exposing the geology underneath. Each one of these bluffs makes interesting exploration for the fascinating geology and equally unique plants that often find purchase thereof. The Mississippi River forms 64 miles of the western side of the State of Kentucky, including the bulbous Bessie’s Bend. This is the smallest portion of any state along the 2300 mile length of the big river.

951 LBD Wicliffe Bluff (1st Kentucky Bluff)

938 LBD Iron Bank (2nd Kentucky Bluff)

934 LBD Chalk Bluff (3rd Kentucky Bluff)

921 LBD Hickman, Kentucky (4th Kentucky Bluff)

The Mississippi Loess Bluffs tower above the river the result of massive dust storms that blew across the Great Plains ten thousand years ago and picked up dried sediment off of 22 million acres of dried glacial dust between the Ohio River and the Gulf of Mexico. It was a Great Dust Storm on steroids, millions of acres of pulverized and dried sediment leftover from the melting of the last ice age (when the continental ice cap retreated northward, yielding its great stores of water into a labyrinth of lacerated streams, all twisting and writhing in snake-like mating season fecundity, forming and reforming channels and carving the Middle and Lower Mississippi valleys at the same time, and the Ohio River valley also, the sum of which was twenty times the present volume of the Mississippi, in the same league as the contemporary flow of the Amazon).

Thousands of years of blowing dust borne by the wild winds of the west hit the calming moisture-rich floodplain of the big valley and was brought to rest by the relatively peaceful atmosphere in giant dunes over its eastern edge, all loess dunes are found east of the Mississippi River. And like all dunes they were piled in repeating patterns of big piles and small piles and no piles at all, tributary valleys in between. And like all wave or ripple patterns they left behind a syncopated miasma of big bluffs and small bluffs rising out of the otherwise flat landscape of the Lower Mississippi Floodplain.