Scientists have called the Pascagoula the last major river system in the lower forty-eight states unaltered by dams, channelization or levees. Its nine-thousand-six-hundred-square-mile basin gathers the Leaf and the Chickasawhay, which meet above Merrill and flow eighty-one miles to the Gulf at Pascagoula and Gautier. In high water the river spreads over its banks into the woods, making a network of lakes and bayous. The Gulf sturgeon spawns in it, and the fish helped block a proposed dam on a tributary, the Bowie River, in the 1990s.
The Pascagoula Wildlife Management Area is the part you can drive to. In the 1970s The Nature Conservancy bought about forty-two thousand acres of riverside land from the Pascagoula Hardwood Company and sold it to the state, which set it aside as wildlife management areas, an early conservation model. The area spans George and Jackson counties near Lucedale. The lower headquarters is on Wade-Vancleave Road, west of Highway 63 in the Wade community. The upper headquarters is reached from Highway 26 near Benndale by way of River Road and Wilkerson Ferry Road.
The river's name means "bread people," and the stories of a Singing River grew from a legend of the Pascagoula going into the water singing. The records show instead that the Pascagoula and other small nations moved west into Spanish Louisiana in 1763. Come for swallowtail kites, ospreys and alligators, and read the rules first.
The closest stops worth working into your route