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LeFleurs Bluff Park
LeFleurs Bluff State Park
2140 Riverside Drive, 601-987-3923
The best playground in town (more like a playworld). A frisbee golf course. The fantastic Museum of Natural Science. Hiking trails. And don’t forget Mayes Lake, with its entrance off Lakeland Drive. It’s the best spot in town to see fall colors: I swear you can pretend you’re in New England while admiring all of the red leaves in October. Quite simply, LeFleur’s Bluff is one of the best things about Jackson. A good friend who has lived here for almost two years recently admitted to me that she had never even been to LeFleur’s Bluff. Well, that’s just silly. It’s like living in New York and never going to Central Park.
--Stuart Rockoff (Best of Jackson, Best Public Park 2005)
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If you need a good park to get the kids sweaty and keep yourself occupied in the process, you can’t do any better than LeFleur’s. Once you’re there, you can see that it’s obvious somebody put a lot of money and time into this place.
The play area has been modernized with a huge pine wood climbing town, complete with bridges, forts and a myriad of easy tools for any kid’s imagination to run away with. Also featured at the park are a plethora of swings, picnic areas with cooking grills, a couple of drink machines, a club house (to hide your obnoxious drunk relatives from the rest of the park during those family reunions), and the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, which is complicated enough to warrant another article unto itself. After a few games of Frisbee golf—or whatever they call that game where you toss a concussion-giving Frisbee into a chain-link receptacle—you can make a desperate run for the air-conditioned museum. The museum will certainly impress you with fossil skeletons and the assortment of evidence describing the remarkable collection of bio-diversity that once claimed Mississippi—at least before it became a state full of white people, cotton and fire ants.
The hiking trail out behind the museum comes in three flavors. You can take the wimpy little kiddie trail, which leads you down a flight of outdoor stairs to the Pearl River tributary running through the property behind the park; you can opt for the medium trail, taking you down to the banks of the Pearl River itself; or you can be man about it and torment the wife and kids with a mile-plus trek all the way to the Mayes Lake Campgrounds.
The view is nice, and the walk is invigorating—that word optimists use for “exhausting.” Make sure you become good friends with a Mayes Lake park bench before trying to make the trip back, or those stairs back up the hill to the museum will utterly end your existence.
Also, take your repellent—otherwise they’ll never find your bodies.
--Joe Jackson (Best of Jackson, Best Public Park 2004)
