Louisiana Paddle Routes and Maps

Most people who come to New Orleans think you have to drive out of town to get on the water. You don’t. There’s a bayou running right through the middle of the city, past front porches and live oaks and the edge of City Park, and on a good morning it’s some of the easiest,…

Ask a hundred visitors in New Orleans to name a swamp and most of them will say Honey Island, a few will say Manchac, and almost none will say Maurepas. Which is wild, because the Maurepas Swamp is the biggest protected wild place of the three. It’s the largest wildlife management area in the whole…

Every swamp worth its salt has a monster. Honey Island’s is the real headliner, the one that made it onto national TV, the closest thing Louisiana has to Bigfoot. And here’s the honest part I’ll tell you up front, before you paddle a single stroke: nobody has ever proven it exists. That doesn’t make the…

You have probably crossed it. Most people have. If you have ever driven Interstate 55 north out of New Orleans toward Jackson, you spent a good ten minutes up on a narrow concrete bridge with swamp on both sides, cypress trees standing in black water as far as you could see, and you almost certainly…

Type “Manchac” into a map and you’ll get two hits about 100 miles apart. Same name, wildly different water. People book a swamp tour, read a Wikipedia paragraph about a colonial fort, and show up expecting a Revolutionary War site. That is the wrong Manchac. Guests ask us to sort this out constantly, so here’s…

Most people meet the Manchac Swamp through a car window, doing 70 on the I-55 bridge, and never learn they just crossed a graveyard. Two towns are under that water. So is the tail end of an international border, a clear-cut cypress forest, and one of the best wildlife corridors left in southeast Louisiana. This…