WHERE HWY 587 ENDS
The Grand Canyon of Mississippi DESCENDING INTO A GAMBOGE DREAMSCAPE Story and photos by Chris Turner-Neal
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he 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’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 grownup’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
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