Monday photo feature

This week's photo feature is actually a set of photos I took this past Friday.  It supports my belief that if you look hard enough, you can find some whitewater in almost any part of the world.

As I've been mentioning in this blog, the Mississippi River recently spent several weeks at a pretty high level--around 32 and a half feet on the Memphis gauge.  When the water rises that high, it inundates a wide swath of bottomland in the basin, and oxbow lakes like Dacus Lake, on the Arkansas side of the river just across from downtown Memphis, become reconnected with the river from which they were born.  If you look back at some of my recent posts you'll see that I was able to paddle onto Dacus Lake during training sessions.

Then, when the river level drops, all that water must run off the bottomland back into the main channel.  On most of the acreage of the Mississippi basin, this happens as quickly as the water recedes; but in places where the floodwater fills in a lake, more interesting things can happen.  The photo above shows what happens where Dacus Lake drains back into the Mississippi, straight across from The Pyramid.

The waterfall in the photo is actually an artificial creation: somebody--the Corps of Engineers, maybe--piled some boulders and poured some concrete in the channel, perhaps to maintain a higher "pool" level in Dacus Lake.  And so, as the Mississippi drops back down from flood stage, water cascades over this precipice just like it would in a mountain creek.  Here's another shot of the falls:

Yes, fellow whitewater paddlers, I most certainly did scout the falls for good lines.  But the rapid is full of sharp rocks and concrete and steel rebar (that's rebar sticking up in the foreground), so a paddler would be banging and scraping at best and pinned at worst.  But if you can ignore the non-natural aspects of this rapid, it does at least offer the pleasant sensations of fast rushing water, and it's a nice place to visit on a hot Mid South summer day.  Here are several more shots of the channel as it runs out to the main river.  You can see The Pyramid across the river in the last one:

I get very excited whenever I find a place like this out there in the vast Mississippi basin, but I've found it difficult to get anybody else to care.  I posted one of these photos on Face Book the other day, and the response I got was mostly a bunch of chirping crickets.  Oh well... perhaps it's an acquired taste.  My excitement is probably similar to what astronomers feel when an eclipse happens.  Over the next few days this rapid will dry up as the Dacus Lake level drops below the top of the concrete-and-boulder dam.