Geography is our passion.
Posts tagged Illinois
FireInTheMountains Bike Tour Journal
711 days
by Jacob
in Travel Forum
Jacob Morgan riding along the Connecticut River
My recent visit to Kansas reminded me of my final days of my two month, Boston to Fort Collins bike tour in 2005 as we drove back out along US 34 and 36 on our way to Manhattan, Kansas from Fort Collins.
On that tour, I had planned to ride from Boston to Montreal to New York City. From New York, I was to head down the mountains to north Georgia finishing in Atlanta and flying back to Colorado from there.
As often happens on a bike tour, plans get drastically changed. Once I reached Washington D.C., I started feeling that I wanted to ride back home instead of to Atlanta. I ended up changing my plans and rode back to Colorado from D.C. instead.
The journal I kept while on that trip is pretty entertaining, I think. I tried to capture the essence of each day on the bike by writing about the day in my tent each night before heading off to sleep. I would then transcribe my entry into an online journal on CrazyGuyOnABike.com the next day when I was able to find a public library.
Read through a few days or more if you can. Let me know what you think.
http://fireinthemountains.crazyguyonabike.com
Click here for a PDF file of the journal.
Mississippi River – Flood Diagram/Map
733 days
Mississippi River Project Design Flood Diagram
The Flood of 2011 on the Lower Mississippi this spring has fascinated me to no end. I’ve been reading lots of news and blogs on the subject as well as digging into other websites of the US Army Corps of Engineers to learn more about this complicated, engineered river system.
Through this I came upon a diagram of the river that is really informative. It visually describes how floodwaters move through the lower Mississippi basin by depicting the river and its tributaries as a tree – with branches sized in scale with the amount of flood flow they are able to carry.
Here are some of the things I find surprising:
- The flood flow of the Mississippi above Cairo, Illinois is TINY. Most of the flow comes from the Ohio River. Even the Tennessee River carries more flood flow than the middle Mississippi.
- The bulk of the capacity of the river is in the middle section between Helena, Arkansas and Vicksburg, Miss rather than at the bottom of the system.
- The river sheds half of its water into the Atchafalaya River Basin through the Old River and Morganza Spillways leaving a much smaller amount of water to continue past Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
