Most people along the Gulf Coast know the name Ben Raines, even if they cannot quite say why. The short version: he is the environmental journalist and filmmaker who found the Clotilda, the last slave ship to reach America, and the underwater cypress forest hidden off Gulf Shores. The longer version involves a career spent documenting one of the most biodiverse river systems in North America — and it turns out the best way to understand either story is to spend a day on the water with him.
That is exactly what a group of us did on a raw early-December morning, meeting Raines at Live Oak Landing near Stockton, just north of Interstate 65, for a six-hour guided tour of the upper Mobile-Tensaw River Delta. The day before had brought a gully washer of rain; the forecast called for a high of 50. We bundled up anyway, and it turned out to be one of the great days of the year.
Who Ben Raines is
Raines has been a lot of things: newspaper environmental reporter, author, filmmaker, boat captain, conservation advocate and, increasingly, the public face of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta. His 2014 documentary “America’s Amazon” made the scientific case that the Mobile-Tensaw River Delta shelters more species of fish, crayfish, salamanders, mussels, snails and turtles than any other aquatic system in North America. His 2020 book “Saving America’s Amazon: The Threat to Our Nation’s Most Biodiverse River System,” with a foreword by the legendary biologist E. O. Wilson, carried the argument further.
Then came the discoveries. In 2017 he produced “The Underwater Forest,” a documentary about the ancient cypress forest Hurricane Ivan unmasked off the Alabama coast — trees more than a thousand years old, buried under sediment for millennia, preserved so perfectly that scientists could read the climate history of an Ice Age floodplain in their rings. And in 2019, working from clues others had chased for decades, Raines located the remains of the Clotilda in the Mobile Delta, the burned and scuttled ship that carried 110 enslaved Africans to Alabama in 1860 — fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed. The community those survivors founded after emancipation, Africatown, still stands in north Mobile.
His most recent film, “Carnivorous Kingdom,” explores one of Alabama’s rarest ecosystems: the pitcher plant bogs, including the Splinter Hill Bog near Bay Minette and the bog where Fish River empties into Weeks Bay, where insect-eating plants thrive in the thin, wet soils of the longleaf pine world.
Into the upper Delta
The tour launched from Live Oak Landing and wound upriver through sloughs and bayous, past fishing camps, hunting camps and a pair of hulking Vietnam War-era ships moored along the banks — vessels rumored, in the way Delta rumors travel, to be destined for new lives as bed-and-breakfast establishments. Houseboats appeared in the coves, including one Raines had just bought and was renovating, which tells you everything about how he spends his time off.
Raines guides the way he writes: with restless curiosity and zero condescension. He points out landmarks and fauna, answers questions with patience, and communicates a child’s excitement about a place he has known his whole life. An hour in, our boat had settled into the rhythm of the trip — questions, answers, wake, birds, repeat.
Bottle Creek: Alabama’s other great mound site
The tour’s first major stop required a hike through flooded creek bottom to a place most Alabamians have never seen: the Bottle Creek Indian Mounds, one of the most important prehistoric Native American sites in the state, second in significance only to Moundville.
The site, on Mound Island deep in the Delta, includes 18 mounds built of shells carried up from the coast, along with canals and residential areas that made it a thriving Mississippian-era ceremonial center from roughly 1250 to 1500. The tallest mound rises 52 feet above the swamp floor. Artifacts recovered there connect the community to other Mississippian cultures across Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida. In an era when travel meant foot or canoe, this drowned corner of the Delta was a hub — a reminder that the waterways we now treat as scenery were once the region’s highways.
The giant cypress
After lunch on a creek bank, we headed for the swamp and the famous tree. Reaching it, in winter, after a day of flooding rain, meant wading a trail covered in one to two feet of water, stepping over thousands of cypress knees and through swamp mud — an adventure with a couple of minor casualties among our group of six.
The tree is worth every step. Twenty-seven feet in circumference, its canopy begins roughly 100 feet off the ground, a surviving giant of the cypress forests that loggers once cut nearly to depletion across the Southeast. Cypress was prized for exactly the quality that saved this one’s neighbors-to-be: its density and resistance to rot. The tree’s location, Raines makes clear, is a closely guarded secret — and having made the slog to reach it, you understand why. Some places lose their magic when they become destinations.
Going yourself
Raines offers guided tours of both the upper and lower Delta, launching from Live Oak Landing near Stockton, just north of Interstate 65. Spring trips fill quickly — and for good reason. The Delta in the spring bloom, with the forest canopy alive and the swamp in flower, is a different world from the stark winter version we saw, itself beautiful in a skeletal, primeval way.
Come prepared: water shoes or old boots, layers, lunch, and a willingness to get wet if the water is up. The delta is a floodplain, and the trail to the big tree floods regularly. That is not a reason to skip it. It is the experience.
Why this place matters
The larger argument of Raines’ work — books, films, tours and all — is that the Mobile-Tensaw Delta is a national treasure hiding in Alabama’s backyard, and that Alabamians are only beginning to understand what they have. The numbers back him up: no other river system in North America supports the sheer variety of aquatic species that this one does. The Amazon of America, he calls it, and after a day in it, the name does not feel like hyperbole.
A day on the water with Ben Raines is a master class in that argument. You come away having paddled a creek that leads to a 700-year-old ceremonial center, stood under a tree older than the country, and heard — from the man who found it — the story of a shipwreck that reshaped a community’s understanding of its own history. Not a bad day’s work for six hours and a rain jacket.
Everyone recovered with a hot shower and a good dinner afterward. Everyone also came away with the same quiet resolution: we have to come back in the spring.