Paddling a ghost swamp

Most people paddle Bayou Bienvenue for the pelicans and the skyline view. But the landscape itself is the real story, and knowing it changes what you see out there.

What this place used to be

Within living memory, this was a freshwater cypress swamp. Families from the neighborhoods along its edge fished it, trapped it, cut timber in it, and swam in it. It was the back door to a working wetland, part of a system that also happened to shield the city from storm surge.

The channel that killed the swamp

In the 1960s the Army Corps completed the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a 76-mile shipping shortcut from the Gulf to the city known locally as MRGO ("Mister Go"). The channel let saltwater pour into a freshwater ecosystem. Salt kills bald cypress, and over the following decades the forest died where it stood. What was swamp became open water studded with ghost-gray stumps, the ones you'll paddle past on your rental. During Hurricane Katrina, the same channel acted as a funnel for storm surge into St. Bernard Parish and the Lower Ninth Ward, and it was finally closed to shipping in 2009. The community coalition Restore the Bayou Bienvenue Wetlands Triangle keeps the full history, and it's worth reading before you paddle.

The comeback

The recovery effort around this bayou is one of the most interesting restoration stories in America, led as much by neighbors as by agencies:

• The Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development, based in the Lower Ninth Ward, pushed for years to reconnect the neighborhood to its wetland, including the observation platform at the end of Caffin Avenue overlooking the 400-acre Wetland Triangle.
• Common Ground Relief grows and plants native cypress and marsh grasses across the Central Wetlands, thousands of trees at a time, much of it volunteer-powered.
• Louisiana's Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority runs the state's Coastal Master Plan, the 50-year blueprint for keeping south Louisiana above water.
• Restore the Mississippi River Delta and the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana organize the science, advocacy, and volunteer plantings at the delta scale.
• Pontchartrain Conservancy monitors water quality and habitat across the basin that Bayou Bienvenue belongs to.

Why paddle it

Louisiana loses about a football field of wetlands every hundred minutes. That statistic stays abstract until you float through a ghost forest with the city skyline behind it, herons hunting the new marsh grass, and young cypress plantings holding the line. This is what a landscape fighting its way back looks like, and a kayak is the only seat close enough to see it properly.

We think more paddlers out here is part of the fix. People protect what they've seen with their own eyes.

See it from the water

Want to do more than look? Both Common Ground Relief and the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana run volunteer planting days that welcome first-timers.