Saturday before last, after I raced down the Mississippi River from Grafton, Illinois, to Alton, Illinois, I rode my bike from Alton back up to Grafton to retrieve my vehicle. During my ride I stopped to take this picture, which illustrates a big difference between the "upper" Mississippi (above the confluence with the Ohio River) and the "lower" river down where I live.
The flow of the upper Mississippi is controlled by a series of dams, just like the Ohio, the Missouri, the Tennessee, the Columbia, and other sizable rivers in North America. Because of that, it's feasible to build a road right alongside the river, like Illinois highway 100 pictured here.
The lower Mississippi has no dams. It's entirely free-flowing, and as it approaches its mouth in the Gulf of Mexico, it meanders wildly across a broad flood plain, occasionally adopting a new course and leaving behind an abandoned meander (an "oxbow lake"). Because of that, there aren't many roads running right alongside the lower Mississippi. Much of the lower river is simply a remote bottomland wilderness.
That's the bike path in the foreground of the photo. It's just a strip of asphalt, similar to the Greater Memphis Greenline here where I live. Much of it was bumpier and weedier than my trail here, however. The section I rode is in two counties: Madison County (where Alton is) and Jersey County (where Grafton is). The condition of the trail improved dramatically as soon as I crossed into Jersey County. Maybe Madison County is experiencing more fiscal stress than Jersey. Or maybe they just don't think it's that important to maintain a bicycle trail.
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