The Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast
The Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast
Latest Episodes
From Great Sewer to Great River: How the Twin Cities Brought a Dead Mississippi River Back to Life
A hundred years ago, the Mississippi River that ran through Minneapolis and Saint Paul was basically a dead river. Factories, people, and local governments dumped sewage and industrial waste into the river until it was a slimy, fetid mess incap...
Deep Time on the Mississippi: The River's Geologic Origins and Future with Roy Van Arsdale
How do you tell the story of a river that's tens of millions of years in the making? In Episode 79, I sit down with Dr. Roy Van Arsdale, Professor Emeritus at the University of Memphis, to trace the deep geologic history of the Mississippi Rive...
The Decades-Long Effort to Tame the Wild Mississippi River: How Engineers Reshaped America's Greatest River
In this episode, I talk with Dr. David Beadenharn, a river engineer who has spent over 45 years studying the lower Mississippi River. David grew up in Vicksburg, Mississippi, stumbled into river work after leaving the Air Force, and never reall...
Better Safe Than Sorry? My Radical Choice to Trust the World
Travel has played an outsized role in my life, has shaped it in overwhelmingly positive ways. In this episode, I share the story behind my new memoir, Better Safe Than Sorry? Slow Boats, Chicken Buses, and the Radical Choice to Trust the Wo...
The River Is Calling — Will You Answer? River Days of Action and National Mississippi River Day 2026
The weather is warming in our part of the world, which means many of us are working on plans to spend time on or near the Mississippi River. And now we’ve got a couple of excellent ways to kick it off, two events that have quickly become centra...
