The Grand Canyon of Mississippi

Descending into a Gamboge Dreamscape

by

The state of Mississippi keeps having to move Highway 587 because a section of it, near Morgantown, keeps falling into Red Bluff. The beautiful and gradually-expanding ravine has gobbled at least two iterations of the road, resulting in GPS directions that instruct drivers to turn off 587 onto 587, and then turn once more onto 587, which terminates in a Thelma and Louise-like road to eternity. (Some responsible party has poured lumps of asphalt to keep drivers from blithely soaring into the void.) For these efforts, you’ll be handsomely rewarded. The views from the top of the valley will knock your socks off, but a short (if strenuous) hike to the valley floor will grant you a close-up look at a truly magnificent natural wonder.

The general consensus, culled from Wikipedia and various hiking websites, is that Red Bluff is on private property, but no one seems to care if you go. I saw nothing posted about trespassing, and a thin but steady stream of people also passed through the day I went: a couple of families, clusters of teenagers on a day out, four people on a double date critically evaluating the grade, and two very optimistic women walking a husky. The upshot is that there’s no curation at all: no guardrails, no signs, no high school students doing public service hours packing out trash bags of empty hard seltzer cans. (You’ll read elsewhere that the site is heavily littered: when I went, there was certainly some, but it was by no means a trash-hole.) “Trail” is an extraordinarily generous term for the route I ultimately found to the canyon bottom, aided by a cluster of teenage boys whose comparatively mountain-goat-like progress I was able to follow from a distance. It had rained the day before, and so the canyon sides were not muddy, but damp. When my foot slid, it slid into the sandy silt, cradling my descent—I didn’t fall, though I did occasionally have to sit down quickly. The good news is that it’s not all that far down in absolute terms, and even moving cautiously it doesn’t take long to reach the canyon floor. Among the unavoidable human debris that I saw on my way down were clots of asphalt and occasional guardrail fragments: relics of the Highway 587 of days past, and an occasionally helpful surface offering traction. 

"I’ve borne witness to the rich, fertile black earth farmers covet, as well as the dusty-rust desaturated reds of the drive to my grandparents’ house in West Texas. But this canyon had another vocabulary entirely. Iron-rich reds layered and striped: the colors of Mars beamed back to us, hinting at our own metallic blood. Yellow upon yellow upon yellow: ochre and turmeric and butterscotch and gamboge."

I’m barely old enough to be part of the generation that ruined the word “awesome,” and now I wish we hadn’t wasted the word on limited-edition sodas and Simpsons merchandise. Red Bluff was the most amazing natural sight I’ve laid eyes on since the few minutes I spent in the eye of Hurricane Zeta. Colors are important to me in a way I’ve never articulated well: they’re the first aspect I notice of a view or a space, and beautiful colors cheer me the way others perk up at music. When I die, I will atone for my sins in a taupe purgatory. And since I write, a special treat of mine is the particular words for specific colors: seeing a vivid red just one click of the dial towards orange is the dish and naming it coquelicot is the sauce. So, when I tell you Red Bluff has the prettiest dirt I’ve ever seen, believe me. I’ve borne witness to the rich, fertile black earth farmers covet, as well as the dusty-rust desaturated reds of the drive to my grandparents’ house in West Texas. But this canyon had another vocabulary entirely. Iron-rich reds layered and striped: the colors of Mars beamed back to us, hinting at our own metallic blood. Yellow upon yellow upon yellow: ochre and turmeric and butterscotch and gamboge. The most surprising treat lay in small clumps at the bottom of the canyon: dense knobs of genuinely lavender clay, a gentle lilac soft as a spring cloud. 

Once you get to the bottom of the canyon and adjust to being in God’s paintbox, there’s not much to do but amble. If I understand the topography right, Red Bluff is effectively a gully that feeds into the Pearl River when it rains. It may take on water when the river is high but isn’t a creek bed itself. The teenagers I had followed down immediately began galumphing their way up the other side of the ravine, climbing the yellow slope that so awed me. With the grown-up’s reticence to embarrass myself in front of the young (we can’t let them know adulthood is all a façade, not yet), I stayed back to explore the crenelated footprint of the gully. A handful of short fingers of terrain to explore on one end; on the other, the water from yesterday’s rain gently flowed out, and the marvelous colors of the bluff gave way to the normal greens and browns of docile woods. With boots and a friend to share balancing duties over the wet rocks, an intrepid day-tripper could have gone further: I later learned that this way leads to wreckage from a 1901 train crash, so ghost hunters and age-of-steam aficionados take note.

[Read another epic hike completed by writer Chris Turner-Neal, here.]

My re-ascent was not remotely dignified. Congenitally short legs and bone-deep klutziness have made me incapable of grace except, I flatter myself, on the page. Combine that with two years’ worth of pandemic ballast, the above-mentioned sandy silt, and a fifty-ish degree angle—and there was a lot of panting, scrabbling, and one section of open all-fours struggling that probably reminded any observers of a plump dog that has almost made it onto a sofa. Again, though, it’s a short trip up or down, and even with humblingly frequent stops to catch up on breath, I was back up within twenty minutes. 

I’d driven out to Red Bluff in a funk, the early days of the invasion of Ukraine forming the newest layer of the COVID–ugly politics–family deaths pearl of discontent I’ve been carrying around for some time. I won’t pretend this day trip fixed my mood, but I left lighter than I’ve felt for a while. A short, tough hike and remembering the word “gamboge” weren’t panaceas, but they were medicines. It can be a mean world, but it’s also a glorious one, and I’m happier for having been reminded. 

If you go:

  • “Red Bluff Trail” took me right there on Apple Maps—you’ll be off the beaten path in terms of common tourist destinations, but you’re not far from civilization, and the part of the road that hasn’t fallen into the gully is in reasonably good repair. A parking area has formed on the shoulder near the road’s end, with plenty of room. I was at the Sonic in Columbia, Mississippi, half an hour after I left. 
  •  Bring a friend and a picnic. There’s not a great area to sit, but you can find a perch. I wanted to stay longer, but even as delighted as I was with the views, without an activity or someone to talk with I found myself looking around saying, “Yep, that’s grandeur all right!”
  •  Don’t make any particularly ambitious plans for your quadriceps the following day.
  •  Really, it’s steep. Wear good shoes, go as slow as you need to, and think critically about kids and dogs—the youngest kids I saw out there were about eight and having a whale of a time cantering up the sides of the valley, but I wouldn’t take younger ones. 
  •  Red dirt can stain—the iron in the soil acts as a mordant and binds to the fabric. Wear grubbing-around clothes.
  •  Photos do not do it justice. If you are remotely a camera person, bring it and try, but give yourself time to look outside the viewfinder and soak it in.