Loess Bluff, at milepost 12.4 of the Natchez Trace Parkway, is a cut through the windblown silt that caps the hills east of the Mississippi River. The Park Service gives that silt a depth of thirty to ninety feet in this part of Mississippi, resting on older sands and clays. It came out of the river valley. During the Pleistocene glaciations, meltwater spread silt across the Mississippi floodplain, and when the flow slackened in the cold months strong winds lifted the dried sediment and laid it down on the uplands to the east. Two sheets of different ages are recognised, the older Sicily Island loess below and the younger Peoria loess at the surface.
The grains are mostly quartz silt, tan to yellowish buff. The soils that form in it, the Natchez and Memphis association, are the most extensive on the whole parkway, about 1,920 hectares in its southern part, and the Park Service rates their loose silty texture highly susceptible to erosion.
The loess around Natchez is also a fossil bed. Charles Lyell described it after visiting Natchez in 1846, and in 1902 Bohumil Shimek reported visiting more than fifty loess localities around the town and finding fossils at 26 of them, four along Liberty Road, where the parkway now ends. His collection held about forty species of land snail, close to the snails living there today, and the commonest snail in the Adams County loess is Polygyra elevata. The Park Service's paleontological inventory counts Loess Bluff among the exposures that may hold the same shells.
Getting there
31.6466, -91.2100
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop is an audio tour guide app that tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
