Funding for Eco trip is provided in part by, support for WYES is made possible by the Arlene and Joseph Meraux Charitable Foundation, dedicated to improving the quality of life in Saint Bernard Parish and implementing innovative strategies to creating lasting, positive change in the entire community.

Just five miles from downtown New Orleans, Saint Bernard Parish offers scenic waterways, rich history, coastal culture, and year round fishing.

Learn more at Visit SaintBernard.com.

The Gustav W McIlhenny Foundation, dedicated to strengthening communities through conservation, education and health.

Supporting organizations that preserve traditional values and expand opportunity for all Americans, especially across the South, and by the WYES producers circle a group of generous contributors dedicated to the support of WYES local productions.

I wouldn't go too far.

The greatest adventures aren't always the ones that take you the farthest.

Listen to the scientists on this one.

I think if you ask anybody who's been to South Louisiana that's not from here, they will tell you that it's different than anywhere else.

I'm taking this journey because I want to understand not just what we're losing or what we're fighting to protect.

This isn't just about saving land.

It's about celebrating a way of life and sharing that celebration.

♪Every night it's a fight.♪ ♪But were running out of time.♪ ♪To get in.♪ Before sunrise in Louisiana.

They are gathering in the community of Saint Bernard.

Checking tires, stretching muscles.

Getting ready to ride to the end of the world.

It's truly a course like no other.

I mean, nowhere else.

Are you going to take a bike ride to the end of the world and literally to to the end of the world.

It's called the tour de parish, and we're following the bayou as far south as the asphalt will carry us.

This isn't a race.

It's an open invitation for weekend warriors and novice alike to see South Louisiana on two or sometimes three wheels.

How far you take it is strictly between you and your legs.

You have four different course options a ten mile, which is, you know, the casual riders and then the 15 mile, and then you get more serious 30 mile and then the 51 mile.

So that's that's the really serious crew.

And that goes all the way down to Delacroix, to what we call the end of the world.

Then they come back up and go down to Hopedale and then Shell Beach and then back to beautiful little museums.

I'm taking the 30 mile course to Delacroix Island and back, 30 miles on a bike just minutes away from New Orleans, through a vista.

Most visitors never know is here.

You know, people don't take advantage of the proximity of where we live.

And there's so much to see and all the different species of birds and stuff that are around and other people in all these urban areas would kill to see what we see.

That is just, you know, 15, 20 minutes away from our doorstep.

Tour de Parish, a track cyclists from all over the year and far, about a quarter of our riders are actually from outside of Louisiana.

You guys are from the Atlanta metro Atlanta Cycling Club.

So our mission is to promote cycling in the African-American community and brotherhood amongst all cyclists.

So we like to go around the country and see other events and enjoy the hospitality that you guys have.

You ready to go?

I'm ready to go.

Let's go.

I don't know, do I need these special shorts?

Jacket short.

Gotta get short.

I gotta get the shorts or I'm chasing for PBS.

All right, all right.

Have fun, guys.

All right.

Don't let me pass you.

All right.

Advice, Take it with a quick change for cruising comfort, not for style.

All right.

Padded shorts on.

It's pretty nice.

Look.

Do I look like I know what I'm doing?

No, I usually never do.

Fortunately, knowing isn't the point.

Peddling is.

And as the sun comes up, the pedaling begins.

Here we go.

Oh, I've never ridden this bike before.

Tour de Parish.

Let's do it.

We're off only 30 miles, right?

Only.

Only 30 miles.

They say riding a bike is, well, like riding a bike.

You never forget.

What they don't tell you is how much it might hurt when you remember.

I bet you didn't know there were that many muscles in your legs.

But I'm feeling every one of them.

Speed limits you can ignore.

I can't go that fast.

But at this pace.

You really get a sense for what the coast is all about.

It's an entirely different world.

Right.

Once you get down there and it's gorgeous, it's beautiful.

I'm a lifelong resident of St.

Bernard Parish.

I was born here.

Still here.

And that's one of my favorite places in the world for our riders to be able to literally ride along those canals that all of the seafood is coming from, and see the boats and see the history.

It's it's truly unique.

And it's like getting a history lesson while you're taking a scenic bike ride.

Probably should have learned how to switch the gears on this thing before I jumped on the bike.

That was a mistake.

You got to be kidding me.

I'm gonna catch you guys.

I'm gonna get you.

Look at these guys.

They're not even breaking a sweat.

Me, on the other hand.

I haven't felt my legs in the last two miles.

Heading out on this out of the ordinary track to Delacroix, you begin to understand.

You get closer to this way of life.

And somewhere along the way, a bunch of strangers, most of them passing me, start to feel like a community.

What's up with that?

Hey!

Great googly.

Thank goodness for padded shorts.

And the inability to feel my lower extremities.

Still, Delacroix awaits.

Come on, man.

Where's the end of this thing?

Is that it?

Is that the end?

That is the end of the world.

It's the end of the world as I know it.

And I feel numb.

There's not many towns you can go to where you get to a point where you just can't go anymore.

And it's unique to us to say that that's where our parish begins and ends.

I can't feel my legs any longer.

This.

You get to go to the end of the world.

Only reason I'm doing it is because I wanted a picture.

End of the world.

When you get to that point, you're literally looking at what?

What made Saint Bernard what it is and what we are today.

Today, it is also the halfway point for this 30 mile ride.

So back on our bikes we ride.

All right.

Tally ho!

To a landscape shaped by the river.

And the people who made their living from this water.

The finish line was calling.

Atlanta.

How are you doing?

Hey hey hey hey.

You guys did it!

All right.

Atlanta.

Good ride.

And by the way, padded shorts.

Yes, that is who.

And this being Louisiana.

Nobody goes home hungry.

From oyster shooters to jambalaya.

The bounty that we've been riding through all morning was now on our plate.

Yeah.

Good, That's delicious.

Yeah.

Oh my goodness.

Your life.

You have changed my life.

I know tour de Parish can change you.

It's a good time on two wheels.

But somewhere between the laughs, the miles and the people you meet along the way, you start seeing this place a little differently.

And maybe start looking beyond.

You look out at the end of the world.

It's.

It's our way of life.

And everyone who rides gets to see it.

And it's just something that's not found everywhere.

The road ends at Delacroix.

The work doesn't.

Because just beyond a sign that says end of the world, people are trying to make sure it isn't.

Today, our eco trip takes us by boat to three Breton land bridge and marsh creation projects, each at a different stage of turning water back into wetlands.

The project sites are part of the program, so was established in 1990 as part of the Bro act, and it's a collaborative effort of five federal agencies and the state.

This whole area has maybe 10 or 12 different projects at various stages of engineering, design or construction or completed construction.

So there's a lot of on this area.

I feel like this area and is particularly at risk.

I mean, the ground is settling here, so you have that sinking going on.

You have the storm events, and then you also have the natural land loss.

And the reason for the land loss is we don't have the sediment coming down the Mississippi River like we used to.

So you have a lot going on here and a lot of reasons why it needs man intervention to take care of some of the problems we have.

It's called dredging.

Digging sediment from the bottom of the lake.

Pumping it through a pipe, sometimes miles long, and using it to build new marsh.

The the mud is coming from Grand Lake right here.

Sort of scooping that up, putting it up, building the ring and then putting the mud in by dredge.

So to put it in simplest terms, it's like a kid building a sand castle on the beach where they have to actually walk out and get their wet sand, bring it over and make their castle.

That's right.

But what you're doing is actually it's a building, a castle.

You're building last.

That's right.

Well, we're building the castle for all the crabs and shrimp and everything like that.

So by building this marsh, you're allowing for healthy habitat to be constructed so that the animals that depend on them.

And in turn, we depend on that runs deep in Louisiana's culture.

This isn't just about saving the wetlands.

It's about what the wetlands make possible, like an extra line of defense when the next storm comes.

All of this work is worth doing, even if it only lasts through the next hurricane season.

The impact it has right now is is beneficial, is worth it.

But when you look at this one and when you look at the next one.

Yeah.

And just the time frame between them, the vegetation is going to be just significantly different.

Its vast though.

This thing looks vast.

As a Louisiana based contractor and someone who grew up in Plaquemines Parish here, I've seen the area changed so much since since I was a little kid.

Places that I went fishing, they're no longer there.

So we've got to make a stand.

♪ I wouldn't go too far.

I'm going to listen to the scientists on this one a year ago where I'm standing, I wouldn't have been standing.

So if you didn't do this a year ago, one of my.

What would I be looking at?

Open water.

That right there.

I've been looking at that.

Looking at that.

Right there.

That's.

So you're a realist.

Yeah.

When you look at this and what has been done.

Does this give you hope?

I'm glad that we're doing it.

We are.

We are at this point, keeping up with Mother Nature.

It was a report that said that we might be, like going ahead of it, but but we're right at we're basically treading water.

But it's tough.

I don't know, I think some of these alligators out here should be sending you a thank you note.

Hey, thank you for the nesting area.

Really appreciate it.

Well done Robert.

Good job.

The first stop showed us land being built.

The next marsh was finding its footing.

Now we're heading to a place that shows us what can happen when it works.

This is done just a little bit after Katrina.

So this is a successful dredge project that now looks like every other marsh.

Personally, these are the most fulfilling projects that we do.

It's when we come to a place that we've helped to rebuild.

And you see the you see it a few years down the road and the the habitats there.

The animals are there.

It means a lot.

I mean, it means a whole lot to my, my team, the guys that work for us, so many of them are local Louisiana guys as well.

They feel personally attached to these projects.

The end of the world is not only where the pavement ends.

It's where the hard work begins and hope endures.

To me, as a marine scientist, it's where the world begins.

So once you get past the end of Delacroix Highway, you know it's definitely not the end of the world.

It's just the beginning.

Maybe some of us are dreamers for what we see as the future of coastal Louisiana.

But I would always rather be an optimist, and I am hopeful.

And every time I come out and get to interact with project managers and coastal communities, I see how impactful this work is.

It's absolutely not the end of the world, literally.

You can go beyond that.

We saw that today, and it's definitely not the end of coastal Louisiana.

I think we owe it to everyone in the country to preserve the natural resources and the historical cultures and customs of this area, so that we get to share it with everybody.

♪ I'm heading back to the river ♪ to wash my sins away.

♪ ♪ Back to the river.

♪ ♪ Ever since your day ♪ in 2019, 30 miles southeast of the end of the world, high water gave the Mississippi an opening and the river took it.

Neptune pass.

No restoration plan.

Just the river and the sentiment it carries.

This is exactly the power of the river you want.

This is the natural delta building that built Louisiana in the first place.

Neptune Pass was a straight shot from the river to the ocean.

And and it got big quick.

In a period of like six months, Neptune Pass went from a, like a minor unnamed waterway to the 10th largest river on the continent.

Nothing like this had happened in the last 100 years or so.

Delta Discovery Tours gave me an opening of my own to watch Louisiana begin again.

We're going to take a short boat ride to see it, and potentially what the future looks like just right here now.

So it is not a fictional story.

This is something that you can see.

We can go out here, we can test it, we can look at it, we can see how much it's grown from one season to the other.

And Neptune Pass will continue to be a discussion on how do we keep that interface with the river.

That is not just important to Louisiana, but to the entire nation.

You know, just like everything in Louisiana, you really just can't talk about it once.

Once is never enough.

So a couple months later, we came back.

Ritchie had grown a beard and Neptune Pass had grown two.

And where the tree line begins on either side of us and past where we could see here.

This is all new land that that formed since 2019.

And some of these willow trees around here, they're 25, 30ft high.

They could support grazing cattle underneath them.

That's only since 2019.

To me, that's just amazing.

If you let nature do what it needs to do and give it the right ingredients, it's going to do really well.

Supplementing the sediment.

Ducks unlimited gave nature a little help.

Terraces.

We finished him early 2021, and then we did additional planting that summer.

But the majority of this, it took off itself.

The good thing about this project is that we do have Neptune Pass, and we do have that really good influx of sediment.

And so what would be a great, good project is now like a really great project.

The land's getting built a lot quicker than it would normally.

What we're going to do today is we're going to grab some of these and get these out in some new areas to kind of kind of kick off some new land growth.

We're transplanting hair right now pretty much.

So think about it.

We're doing the Matthew McConaughey by replanting some hair somewhere.

Sorry, Matthew.

Who we all know it's true.

♪ Out here every little bit of growth matters because on the coast the current never stops and neither does the change.

There's a cycle with the delta and there's, you know, somebody put it this way, whatever's not busy being born is busy dying.

And and I've tried things on the other side of the river.

There's no freshwater input.

There's no sediment.

The place where I learned to swim just washed away.

Right?

It's not on the map anymore.

The mapmakers took it off.

There's nothing there anymore besides some piling foundations where people used to go past a good time.

And on this side of the river, it's completely the opposite.

The river is connected places that are eight feet deep.

Now.

They're ankle.

Ankle deep.

Though I do think it's about harnessing it.

I think it's about balance.

I think we're we're well past the point of just letting nature do what she wants, because we do we do need that control.

We need that balance there.

But she can certainly be our biggest ally in how we think about a future here in South Louisiana.

Neptune, mass is a reminder of what this river can still do.

♪ Hey, Yah.

♪ Sometimes what they call the end turns out to be a pretty good place to start, and a pretty good place to find out what the coast tastes like right on the Mississippi River in New Orleans, Delacroix recalls fish camp living with a much better kitchen.

And in that kitchen, chef Wylie is cooking the food she grew up with.

So we're going to do the snapper collars first.

We're gonna do what ?

Snapper collars.

It's a red snapper collar.

And the coolest part is it's like you can even eat the fin because it's like a chip you could batter and fry it.

It is one of the most unusual.

It looks like.

It looks like almost like a pterodactyl or something.

Hanging out.

Cooking is my passion.

Food is my passion.

I think about it more than I should, but, obviously this is why I'm here now.

When I was growing up, my dad, after he would come home from from chartering his guests and he would scale and fillet it.

And then the next thing you knew, he would be like, Wylie, this is the best part of the fish.

We have to have it.

That's where I learned it.

My dad did it growing up, and this is like almost like a Delacroix delicacy, if you will.

And once you've tried it, you got to have it.

These are our jumbo Louisiana Gulf shrimp.

And these are just I mean, again, as fresh as you can get live in Louisiana.

These are right out of the Gulf.

You see the shrimp boats coming in pass exactly right.

Coming up the bayou.

And they have their fins out because they're a they kind of look like they kind of do look like that.

You're absolutely right.

I love that.

So there's a little pepper jack cheese.

And then we have the shrimp and crab Creole sauce that we make stuff in bread because that's what they used to do.

They would have too many sauces and to much bread.

And it's like how do we incorporate it all?

So stuff it, fry it, put it with a little butter.

It's divine.

Is that something you learned from your background that nothing goes away?

So I grew up cooking.

My grandfather was a chef also.

So we grew up cooking and eating and learning about all of this South Louisiana goodness.

Your family's cooking background isn't in a restaurant like this is home cooking.

It's at home, for sure.

The duck camp, the fishing camp that grew up doing all that long before it was on a menu, it was just family dinner.

How do I I'm going to show you.

Okay.

I kind of just pick it up and you just take a bite, okay.

Oh the sauce.

And it just falls right off and oh it's so good.

But then you also get the fin and you get the chip and eat the whole thing.

I'm eating a fin.

This is amazing.

I mean this is like the best tasting chip I've ever had.

And trust me, I've eaten a lot of chips.

And this.

Yeah, and it's a little messy, but that's the point.

It's okay.

You're playing in the mud, and you come to eat some fried food and go off shore fishing.

And it's just part what part of it?

And everything's meant to be shared and tasted and talked about, and everything tells a story.

What's the story you want your food to tell?

The biggest thing for me is how special South Louisiana is.

There's nothing like it.

You go down there.

You.

I've never loved the smell of mud and water as much as I ever thought I ever would.

It's the most creative and inventive type of cuisine that is in the country.

If you ask me, we have the wild Morgan City catfish.

We've got the jasmine rice, the turtle sauce with beef cheeks.

These are all dishes that we had to make do with what we had.

And there's nothing else like it.

I mean, Delacroix is beyond special.

If we didn't have the coast, we wouldn't have the seafood.

We wouldn't have the history, the wildlife.

It all translates so easily to Louisiana and southern coastal food.

Chef Wiley story started with family, nature and a life lived outdoors.

The things that shaped her then, have brought her to Delacroix somewhere young Wiley never imagined.

I never thought that would ever happen.

Little me over there is just screaming and with joy.

So here we are, and we get to tell the stories and learn more about our ourselves through cooking and share it with the world.

♪ They call this the end of the world, but nothing here seems all that interested in ending.

People keep choosing the road less traveled, working in the water.

The river keeps moving.

New land takes hold.

Maybe that's the thing about the end of the world.

It keeps finding ways to begin again.

♪ Funding for eco trip is provided in part by, support for WYES is made possible by the Arlene and Joseph Meraux Charitable Foundation, dedicated to improving the quality of life in Saint Bernard Parish and implementing innovative strategies to creating lasting, positive change in the entire community.

Just five miles from downtown New Orleans, Saint Bernard Parish offers scenic waterways, rich history, coastal culture, and year round fishing.

Learn more visit SaintBernard.com.

The Gustav W McIlhenny Foundation, dedicated to strengthening communities through conservation, education and health.

Supporting organizations that preserve traditional values and expand opportunity for all Americans, especially across the South, And by the WYES Producer Circle, a group of generous contributors dedicated to the support of WYES local productions.