Little Mountain, the hill that carries the Jeff Busby overlook at milepost 193.1 of the Natchez Trace Parkway in Choctaw County, rises to about 600 feet above sea level. A 1998 geologic map of the Tomnolen quadrangle by the Mississippi Office of Geology places the hill in the Tuscahoma Formation of the Wilcox Group: Paleocene sand, greenish gray when fresh and weathering reddish orange to pale yellow orange, interbedded with clay, silt and lignite, about 400 feet thick in all.
The summit stands roughly 220 feet above the flats of Middle Bywy Creek, which the parkway crosses at its northern foot. The state geological survey's 1943 report on Choctaw County observed that across the county, ground underlain by sand stands higher and steeper than ground underlain by clay, and that layers of sandstone hold up the steepest slopes and greatest elevations. It placed the county in the Red Hills phase of the North Central Hills.
The Tomnolen map labels the lignite seams inside the Tuscahoma H through L, the lettering used at the Red Hills Mine, a lignite surface mine about seven miles northwest of Ackerman that fuels the adjacent Red Hills power plant. Most of the seams the mine works lie lower, in the Nanafalia Formation. The basal sandy interval of the Tuscahoma is the Middle Wilcox aquifer.
Getting there
33.4135, -89.2611
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
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