kayak louisiana

Louisiana has more bayous than most people could name, and honestly, more than the state itself has ever bothered to count exactly. They thread through the whole southern half of it: slow, dark, cypress-lined, some of them older than the state and a few older than the river that made them. Ask ten people to…

You’ve heard the word your whole life. Bayou. It’s in the songs, the movies, the accent. But if someone put you on the spot and asked what a bayou actually is, could you say? Most folks can’t. And that’s fair, because it’s a slippery little word for a slippery little thing: water that barely moves….

You are ten minutes into a paddle, the water is glass, and something the size of a fat housecat slides off the bank and swims right across your bow. Round tail. Slow. Not bothered by you at all. Then it turns its head and you catch two front teeth the color of a traffic cone….

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…

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…

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…