Daniel Price
September 11, 2006

I ride my mountain bike alongside the Wolf River near Shelby Farms. Apart from haphazard explorations of the channelized river’s one-time meanders, my only reason for noticing the stream has been the trail’s proximity to its precipitously steep banks. Inside Memphis, the Wolf appears to be nothing but a glorified drainage ditch. My initial response to our study of the Wolf was dubious at best; of all the places to canoe, a heavily polluted and channelized river seemed like a ridiculous choice.
I definitely made an erroneous judgment in declaring the Wolf a lost cause. Our Ecology class’s trip to the Ghost Section completely reshaped my view of the river’s value. The upper Wolf as an outdoors experience is entirely different from anything I’ve run across elsewhere. The Ghost trail in particular is truly spectacular. The whole idea of a blazed trail for canoe use would have sounded ludicrous three weeks ago; having grown up in Northwest Arkansas, I had a very different vision of what a stream should be.

Ancient cypress, countless dragonflies, and fields of pond lily set a unique mood. The upper portions of the Wolf give off a sense of agelessness; the blazes of the Ghost trail in many places represent the only signs of humanity. The river’s seemingly sacrosanct isolation is largely illusory, though, as evidenced by our excursion the following week.

The headcut region of the Wolf is an unbelievably striking example of hydrologic management gone wrong. Below the Corps’ of Engineers ‘steps’, the river’s banks become horribly unnatural cliff sides. The phrase “apocalyptic wasteland” lodged itself in my mind through the entirety of our Middle Wolf excursion, as the river was choked with the remains of undercut trees. The cypress, pond lilies, and even seemingly ubiquitous Gyrinus were absent, large foam ‘islands’ from the sewage outfalls taking their places. In many ways, the headcut’s dramatic breakdown is even more striking than the older depredations of the river’s channelized sections.

The Wolf River excursions were extremely satisfying as outdoor adventures, but more importantly, they were incredibly real examples of conservation biology issues previously dealt with only in theory. I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to canoe sections of the Wolf River; in two Sundays, I gained a new perspective on a river I’ve seen every day for years.