2001: Of Love and Loess in the Natchez Hills

This story was selected by the Country Roads magazine editorial team as the representative piece for 2001 in the archival project "40 Stories From 40 Years"—celebrating the magazine's 40th anniversary on stands. Click here to read more stories from the project.

“People just don’t notice these things anymore,” Jim Conrad said as he took a breather from an early afternoon hike on Laurel Hill Plantation just south of Natchez. He was standing in a cool, sand-paved gully that lies beneath a canopy of maples and hickories–trees  not normally associated with the Deep South. 

As he rapidly scaled the fallen timber that obstructed his path, the writer and naturalist seemed to leave his fifty-something-year-old body behind and take on the youthful energy of an eight-year-old. Scurrying across a creek, he pointed to a cluster of maidenhair ferns growing along an embankment. 

[Read about Chris Turner-Neal's 2022 descent into the "Grand Canyon of Mississippi," here.]

“That’s very rare for around here,” he said excitedly before continuing onward. He pointed toward the sky where a Mississippi Kite flew high above, traced the footprints of wild boar and rummaged through small pebbles, searching for the semi-precious stones that are common to the area. 

For the past three years, Conrad has been living on Laurel Hill, studying what he believes is the most overlooked geological feature of Mississippi–the loess hills. The hills were formed 14,000 to 24,00 years ago, when glaciers covered much of the northern United States. During Summer, warm air would melt these glaciers, leaving enormous mudflats. When the weather cooled, strong winds swept sediment from the mudflats into huge clouds of dust that blew down the Mississippi, forming hills and bluffs anywhere from 2 to 350 feet high. These bluffs now rise above swampy lowlands intersected by deep, steep-walled bayous and vines. Asides from Mississippi, loess hills are found in Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Illinois and Kansas. 

Before Conrad came to live at Laurel Hill–in the heart of what he calls the “loess zone,” he frequently visited Germany, where he still spends his summers working. 

“The people there are so intimate with their landscape,” Conrad said. “On weekends, they go out and take hikes and ride their bicycles. They go hikes and ride their bicycles. They go to special museums that focus on to special museum that focus on archaeology and everybody loves it. In my opinion, it (the loess zone) is just as interesting and exciting as what we have in Europe, and yet there’s very little here (as far as tourism). 

[Read about "Natchez Poppy Guy" Gregory Brooking in James Fox-Smith's 2020 story, here.]

“The Natchez Trace Parkway is the closest thing we have in our area. They’ve done a very good job, but there’s no reason why we can’t do the same thing with the loess zone.”

Conrad would eventually like to see a double corridor created so visitors can drive south on the Natchez Trace then go back north via the loess zone. 

To get a sense of the area’s unique landscape, Conrad recommends sightseers take a quick drive starting from Natchez. “Get in the car and go eastward a few miles,” Conrad instructed. “If you have any eye for vegetation, you’ll see that here you have oaks, hickories, magnolias, sweet gums and maples. 

“This is known as the southern pine tree region of the Deep South, but there are no pine trees here because of the loess. So not only is this (landscape) providing an enormous boost to the biodiversity of the area, but the loess itself is providing a finger of forest. If we went into central Tennessee, we would find forests like this. So this is kind of an extension of that forest down here.” 

Loess can be seen prominently along the Mississippi River in Natchez, where historic mansions are perches high above the river on steep loess bluffs. While tourists regularly visit Natchez to see these homes, Conrad wants them to see the surrounding area’s important geological features as well. In the future, he envisions the loess hills around Natchez as a popular eco-tourism destination that will include bed-and-breakfast lodging in out-of-the-way places, canoe rentals for wildlife viewing, stables offering horse rentals for trail riding and pay fishing ponds. 

While it is not easily accessed now, Mammoth Bayou, an enormous ravine just north of Natchez, is also a potential eco-tourism site, Conrad said. 

“There have literally been tons of bones and archaeological artifacts found here,” Conrad said. “People could come to Natchez and tour some of the old houses, then they could take a walk down into the bayou and see how loess forms a very special type of habitat or landscape. Then they could go to a center where they could see archaeological artifacts, bones and reconstructed skeletons of Ice Age animals that have been found here.” 

Since these artifacts, which include the remains of mammoth, ground sloth and several primitive country, Conrad said he needs help tracking them down, and he is seeking volunteers. 

“If I had people working with me, this is one of the first projects I would put them on,” he said. “I would ask them to write a few letters and find out where some of this stuff is. Once we find out where it is–and what it is–maybe we could make a proposal to the (state) government, and say ‘Here’s what’s available. Here’s what it would cost to get it together. How about some money and we’ll do it.’”

While Conrad is in the market for professional volunteers, he is also looking for help fron area high school students. Instead of doing their term papers on George Washington, Conrad asked, “why can’t students do something that’s relevant to the loess zone, the place they live in? We could put nice term papers on the Web about interesting historical events that have occurred in the loess zone. There’s room for participation here from everybody–from high-powered attorneys who can help us get grants to a kid in high school who just wants to do something relevant to the place he or she lives in.” 

While Laurel Hill Plantation Mammoth Bayou and several of the other areas Conrad studies are mostly off limits to hikers, there are places to see good examples of loess landscapes. Conrad recommended Clark Creek as an ideal spot. 

“This is a wonderful place to hike trails through one of the most rugged parts of the loess bluff area,” Conrad said. He also suggested taking Highway 61 north of Baton Rouge into the Tunica Hills, where red sediments and tan-colored loess lie beneath rolling hills. Here, some of the hills rise to 350 feet and stream valleys may go as far as two hundred feet deep.” 

“My motive for all of this is getting people to see the loess zone as something worth maintaining the integrity of– a place worthy of preserving and worth honoring,” Conrad explained. “We have a very fragile habitat that’s endlessly interesting.

“People ought to be proud of it—and they ought to know about it.”