Click here to learn more about the new Quapaw Canoe Co. store opened in Helena, AR on June 27, 2008.

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

Celebrating 10th year of operation in 2008.  Founder/Owner John Ruskey has been on the river since 1982.  Quapaw Canoe Company provides custom-guided canoe & kayak expeditions, day floats and other paddling adventures along the Lower Mississippi River from Cairo Illinois to St. Francisville, Louisiana.  Spectacular reaches include the Kentucky Bluffs, Bessie’s Bend (20 mile bend of the river to go one mile), the 4 Chickasaw Bluffs, Memphis to Vicksburg (300 miles of remote river, only 2 bridges, only one town), Confluence of the Arkansas River & surrounding wilderness areas (rich habitat for the Louisiana Black Bear), Vicksburg to Natchez-Under-the-Hill, Natchez to St. Francisville.  Long stretches of river, almost no industry or point-source polluters, few towns, few bridges, big islands, big forests, most varied inland fishery in North America, 60% of America’s songbirds, 40...
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May 23, 2008:
Hail, Hail, Rock'n'Roll 'I look at the Mississippi and I feel the same sense of magnitude and awe, of uncontainability and possibility, as when I think of music'Laura Barton
Friday May 23, 2008GuardianMy companion points across the street. "That," he says, his voice a little tarry and dry, "is the spot where jazz was born." The car is nudging onto North Rampart Street in New Orleans, facing Congo Square, on the edge of Louis Armstrong Park. In the 18th and 19th centuries, slaves would congregate here on Sundays to dance and play music, a practice that would eventually evolve into jazz. Today, the square sits empty, a vista of shimmering heat and broad green leaves, and the only sound is that of cars rushing by in a blur of hot metal and warm tyres. I squint through the windscreen. There are squashed bugs on the glass. It is hard to feel anything. Not far from here are the banks of the Mississippi, and later that afternoon I am driving across the water, listenin...
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click here for the "Mississippi Journal" archives

• 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