Lucius Burch Wolf River Loop

Lucius Burch preserves a surprisingly wild slab of Wolf River bottomland hardwood forest inside the Memphis city limits, and this loop samples the best of it: out on the yellow-blazed Wolf River Trail through oak, sweetgum, and river birch flats, across a short levee connector, and back on the blue-blazed trail that runs nearer the river, past sloughs that hold water and wood ducks most of the year. The ground is genuinely flat, but this is a floodplain — after rain the trail turns to shoe-sucking mud, and when the Wolf runs high whole sections go underwater, so check conditions before bringing new shoes or small kids. Mosquitoes are fierce from late spring through fall, and poison ivy crowds the trail edges. Blazes matter here because informal paths braid through the bottoms; keep to the marked yellow and blue trails and the loop is easy to follow back to the Walnut Grove Road trailhead it started from.