Cole Creek, at milepost 175.6 of the Natchez Trace Parkway in Attala County, has a short Park Service trail through a swamp that is turning into a forest. The 750-foot path, which the park reckons a fifteen-minute walk, begins among water tupelo and bald cypress and ends in mixed bottomland hardwoods. Water tupelo can survive with its roots completely under water, and the swollen base of its trunk, called a buttress, helps hold it upright. Bald cypress is known by its knees, which the Park Service notes were once thought to be breathing organs and are now believed to give the tree extra support.
As sediment fills the swamp, other trees take hold, and the trail names them: beech, hickory, red oak, chestnut oak, ash and elm. The park's forecast is that the creek will be held more and more within its banks until the place is a hardwood forest with a creek running through it and no trace of the swamp. Bald cypress is a southern tree on the parkway; the Park Service's vegetation survey puts its northern limit along the road at about milepost 257, in northeast Mississippi.
Its water ran short of oxygen when it was last studied. Sampled seven times between the fall of 2007 and the winter of 2009, Cole Creek fell below the state's instantaneous minimum of 4.0 milligrams of dissolved oxygen per liter on four occasions, and it was the only one of the parkway's stations whose average fell below the standards. A 2014 Park Service assessment connected low oxygen in these Mississippi basins to flat topography, slow-moving water and warmer temperatures. The creek runs beside the parkway for several miles and drains to the Yockanookany River and the Pearl.
Getting there
33.2290, -89.4460
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
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