Get your copy of the 30th Anniversary Issue of Outside Magazine, and see the story "Anyone for a Dip?" (Pgs. 164-172)

We guided Editor-at-large (and Memphis native) Hampton Sides on a baptismal cross-channel swim last May. For a preview of the psychology involved, and an interesting preview of Hampton's next work of non-fiction, a Memphis-based oral history of the Martin Luther King Assassination, listen to the podcast on the Outside Website, or read the story.

If you've ever listened to the blues, or R&B, or hip-hop, you need (that's right, need) to make a pilgrimage to the land that started it all: the Mississippi Delta.


continue to National Geographic

For millions of people in the mid-South, the wilds of the Mississippi floodplain are as close to home as the post office or the nearest grocery store, and yet as far away as the dark side of the moon. 

For instance, a quick & refreshing retreat from downtown Memphis involves loading your kayak and paddling around Redman Bar.  Total round trip: 2-3 hours, depending on water level.  In Vicksburg, disappear through the woods into Centennial Lake (at higher river stages).  In Helena you can imagine yourself in the Amazon basin after only an hour of paddling, no sign of the town, of the bridge, the casino – all indications of civilization swallowed by the dense forests & wide meandering back channels.  Not a single cottonfield or grain elevator in view.  Isn’t this the quintessential experience Thoreau exhorted?  Access to the American wilderness?

• Read “NAW WE AINT GOT NO MOTOR” RAFT TRIP by Melvin H. McFatter
  
  
• Read the Announcing "Big Muddy" press release
  
  
• Visit the Big Muddy Adventures Ruskey and Clark Expedition Website
  
  
• View the expedition journals from The Big Muddy Adventures.
  
  
• The Making of the Water Ram
  
  
• The Clarion Ledger, April 7, 2005 - "Getting out on the Mississippi River is something like getting on a Big Mountain"

River Rat: John Ruskey brings adventure tourism to the Mississippi River