I had never heard of Red Bluff before until somebody on here (I forget who though) mentioned it. I saw a couple pictures and was intrigued. As it turns out, my brother just started a new job working the exact same schedule as me, so I gave him a call and asked if he'd like to come up and check this place out with me. He showed up to my house about 10:00 this morning and after about an hour and a half of running errands, we were on our way. We left my house in Hammond, La at about 11:30 and arrived there just a little after 1:00. It was an impressive sight when we first pulled up: What's funny is you can't really see anything from the road. There's just a sign that says Red Bluff with an arrow pointing toward another road that leads off into the woods. It's just a regular old country two lane road. If you didn't know what was back there, you'd just drive on past and never know. It seems the hole here just keeps expanding. There were a few fallen trees that still had their roots intact where the ground just washed away under it. The same thing seems to be happening to the road. My old hooptie: And just in case you didn't notice the giant hole in the ground, somebody thought he should warn us: We played in the dirt a little beside the road, where my brother's KLR decided to take a nap right after trying to eat a pine tree... In his defense, there was a kinda steep and very rutted hill immediately in front of this. We saw some hikers walk off on a trail into the woods, so we figured we'd follow them (on the bikes, of course). The rideable section of trail wasn't very long, but ended at a pretty scenic ledge. We decided to leave the bikes here and go the rest of the way on foot. Where we left the bikes, you can see the crumbling road in this shot: From up there I could hear the sound of rushing water, so I thought we should go take a look. There was a little path that lead back into the woods and downhill. It eventually brought us to a nice little stream with small waterfalls and was really a pretty cool sight, especially for south Mississippi. The place also seems to be some people's trash dump. There were lots of old tires, a couple rusty old appliances, and lots of old beer cans and plastic bottles. My brother did bring up a good point when he said "It would probably be fun to get drunk and watch a tire roll down this hill." You can see one of these tires off to the right of this picture: We continued following the stream until it lead us back into the bottom of the pit, which we found to be made up entirely of loose sand, old concrete, pebbles of various sizes, and some kind of strange purple clay. Being down at the bottom gave a little better perspective on how big the place is. you can just see the KLR's fairing peeking over the ledge: From another angle: Here's a cropped version in case you couldn't find the bikes. You can see the KLR well, but my Honda isn't so easy to spot. You can kinda see my helmet in front of the tree by the KLR. It turned out to be quite tiring climbing up and down all that sand, there was almost no solid ground down there. Here you can see how the rocks block the loose sand from being eroded away by the rain. It's really pretty bizarre looking: I never thought a little trip like this just 90 miles from home would turn into such a hiking adventure. It was a great time and I definitely plan on going back sometime soon. I'll bring my DSLR next time too, though it seems my phone (Samsung Galaxy S3) did pretty well. For some reason Photobucket really wants those two sideways pics up there to stay that way, I'll try to fix it.
Nice pics of Red Bluff. Did you continue up 587 to Monticello? Lots of twists and turns for this area. Lots of bikes on a nice day.
No, we just headed back down south. Maybe next time we'll keep going up north and check it out. I like being able to go out and ride on weekdays, I don't think we saw another bike on the road all day, There weren't all that many people at Red Bluff either, just one couple out there when we got there and a group walking their dogs out there when we left. Yet another thing I love about shift work...
Nice RR Matt, Red Bluff is a good reason to get out and ride. Looks a lot like this RR http://advrider.com/forums/showthread.php?t=709777 only you took the time to venture down to the stream. We did our ride in almost 100 degree August heat. You're only a short ride from me (maybe 30-40 min away) maybe we can do some exploring out toward the back roads of Pearl River area one day. Subscribe to this one: there are a few of us in LA that like to burn up a day on the back roads every once in a while. http://advrider.com/forums/showthread.php?t=740190
That was one of the threads that inspired the trip. Luckily for us it was nice and cool for some hiking. Still sore from climbing all that loose sand... definitely gonna keep going north to Monticello next time. Also subscribed to the la ride thread. Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk 2
