Though operators are building ships, and towns are investing in landings and other infrastructure, fluctuations in the river’s flow, exacerbated by climate change, are hampering sailings.
By Rowan Moore Gerety
Rowan Moore Gerety spoke to civic leaders, cruise passengers and several cruise-industry businesses focused on the Mississippi River.
July 11, 2024
Tom Trovato and his wife, Trish, paid more than $20,000 and waited two years to experience Viking’s inaugural cruise up the Mississippi River. Leaving in September 2022, it was supposed be a two-week excursion from New Orleans to St. Paul, Minn., a trip of some 1,800 miles.
They never got past Memphis.
Low water levels, caused by drought, narrowed the river’s main shipping channel to allow only one-way traffic, first stalling their boat, the Viking Mississippi, and then ultimately aborting the trip.
Though they got a full refund, the Trovatos, who live in Surprise, Ariz., have no plans to try again.
“If I live to be 125, it might be on my bucket list,” said Mr. Trovato, 79.
The Mississippi River is central to American identity, with all the contradictions that entails. It’s an artery that sustained Indigenous cultures for thousands of years — “Mississippi” derives from the Ojibwe for “great river” — and it marked the frontier from which Lewis and Clark set out to find a route to the Pacific. The river’s alluvial deposits and deep waters formed the basis of prosperity for generations of farmers, and brought perdition to vast numbers of enslaved people who toiled along its banks and feared little more than being “sold down the river.”
For many people, particularly baby boomers reaching their retirement years, a cruise along the Mississippi River is a dream trip. But it’s becoming harder to make it come true. Though operators are building new ships, and towns and cities are investing in infrastructure to welcome boat traffic, cruises on the Mississippi face mounting challenges from an increasing number of droughts and floods.
Decades of forest and wetland destruction, dam construction and dredging have added to natural fluctuations in the Mississippi’s flow. Now climate change has only heightened the river’s tendency for dramatic seasonal shifts in water levels, frequently rerouting ships and causing delays.
Just late last month, in St. Paul — the final port for the Trovatos’ original itinerary — rising Mississippi River levels forced the closure of shoreline roads, bridges and parks. The river rose 20.17 feet above its banks before cresting, the seventh major flood in St. Paul since 2010, according to the National Water Prediction Service, and the eighth highest crest recorded.
Farther south, Memphis had made its $40 million Beale Street Landing the centerpiece of a larger redevelopment of parks and trails snaking along six miles of Mississippi shoreline. Last year, more than half of the 128 scheduled cruise ship landings there were canceled, mostly because of low water levels that made it impossible for the boats to reach the dock.
In July 2021, an overnight passenger riverboat visited Kimmswick, Mo., for the first time in 125 years, when the 341-foot American Duchess docked at its new landing. The town was expecting the cruise industry to boost tourism in the area. But the American Duchess was also the last cruise to dock there. There hasn’t been enough water for boats to come back until recently: The Viking Mississippi was finally scheduled to land in Kimmswick on Monday, but this time, the water was too high.
“We’re just seeing climate impacts stack up,” said Colin Wellenkamp, the executive director of the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative, a coalition of local governments along the river. “We used to see them every 10 to 15 years, now we’re seeing them where they just don’t quit.”
‘Demand’s not going anywhere but up’
Cruise-ship passengers often take excursions by bus. In Europe, cruise operators often ferry passengers between segments of a trip on chartered buses.Credit...Whitten Sabbatini for The New York Times
Despite the pandemic, when most travel worldwide was at a costly standstill, bookings on river cruises in the United States rose 25 percent from 2019 to 2022, according to data from AAA, the automobile owners’ group that also tracks air and cruise travel. An analysis by the market research firm Grandview Research in 2022 projected continued growth of more than 20 percent a year for U.S. river cruising through 2030, largely on the strength of the Mississippi River cruises.
River cruising “took off first in the European rivers, but it’s always been really built on American travelers,” said Charlie Robertson, an owner and chief executive of American Cruise Lines, the dominant operator on the Mississippi. Both American and Viking, a major player in Europe and Asia, are already booking Mississippi cruises into 2025, and building new ships to serve this market. Though the parent company of the third Mississippi cruise operator, American Queen Voyages, declared bankruptcy earlier this year, citing difficulties recovering from the effects of the pandemic, American Cruise Lines purchased all four paddle wheelers in its fleet.
“Demand’s not going anywhere but up,” Mr. Wellenkamp said. “Everybody wants to see the historic Main Street, and everybody wants to see this ecological icon Mark Twain wrote about.”
A small bridge near Kimmswick, Mo. For many cruise ships, sailing under some bridges that span the Mississippi during high water is impossible.Credit...Bryan Birks for The New York Times
In Kimmswick, the new landing had local leaders dreaming of a return to the town’s roots as a key stop for Mississippi steamboats. After years spent building sandbag levees to protect Kimmswick — three major floods threatened the downtown since 2015 — and building a landing to accommodate 40-foot swings in the river’s flow, drought severe enough to threaten the town’s economic prospects seemed unthinkable.
“How can you be a river-facing city if you don’t have any riverboats?” said Phil Stang, Kimmswick’s mayor.