UKH

Hi,

Reading through a guide book the other day I was curious why there are so many climbs in the Peak District with the word Mississippi in the name.

Any history buffs about who might know its origins?

Mike

In the case of Mississippi Butress, it’s just the rough shape isn’t it?

???

The shape of the river? Or the state?

Quick google (for a map image) seems to indicate that it's the shape of the west side of Mississippi state, but I presume that's also the course of the Mississippi river.

It's surprising if someone, presumably from the UK, would look at the outline of the buttress and think "That looks just like the course of the Mississippi". 

It's a pretty distinctively shaped state owing to the big cut out at the bottom left, maybe they were just more geographically minded than you? We have all sorts of daft names for bits of rock.

Mississippi Chimney was not named by first ascensionist Puttrell, but later in the 20s or 30s by Pigott, Wood or Byne. The nearby? Manhattan Chimney was apparently named by them in honour of Rice Kemper Evans, an american who was part of their climbing group and was on first ascent. This possibly started the tradition of geographical names? There's also of course the adjacent Congo Corner.

Well, I do have a degree in geography. But as I'm fond of saying when people ask me things like "which is the world's longest river", that doesn't make me into a walking gazetteer. I expect I could recognise quite a few of the US states in outline, but Mississippi has never impinged on my attention to that degree, and I suspect I'm not alone in this.

Surely, if Manhattan came first, Mississippi was just a pun on that.

And as for not being very geographically minded, what's all this "bottom left" business?

I thought I implied that.