Driskill Mountain (Louisiana Highpoint)

Now that I have graduated and we have a place lined up in New York, it is time to play a little!  Our moving truck came on May 24th but won't arrive in New York until June 3rd.  What do you do with all that time?  Well..... drive across the country visiting friends, family and state highpoints, of course!

Starting last Sunday, I left Provo, UT with Sy and Soren.  Anne caught up with us in Austin, TX and we spent a couple of days there visiting with friends, colleagues, and also checking in on our rental homes in town.  After a packed visit in Austin, we stopped in Houston to see my brother, CJ, and his family.  We had a great visit with them as well.

Now..... if you are in Houston and you are heading to Atlanta, you wouldn't exactly call Shreveport "on the way" ..... and even if you did, you wouldn't then head as far south as Pensacola, but that is exactly what we were about to do.  We headed north for about 5 hours and finally crashed at a hotel in Minden, LA around midnight.  Minden is about 30 miles NW of the LA highpoint.

I knew we had a full-day of driving ahead of us the next day so I woke up at 6:30am and finished the drive to Driskill Mountain while everyone was still sleeping.   While driving I reflected on how much just driving to these places is a part of the highpointing adventure.  Even the ones that don't require significant planning (i.e. Rainer, Granite, etc..) or long trail distances (i.e. Wheeler, Whitney, etc...) still bring a reward.  These places are pretty much always off the beaten path and you get a better feel for a place as you drive the country and local roads.  The directions are rarely as straight forward as they seem on paper and four wheel route finding is just part of it all.  Driskill Mountain was that kind of a highpoint.....

The trail head sits beside a graveyard and a local church in a rural Louisiana community.  The trail is surprisingly well maintained with excellent signage courtesy of a local Eagle Scout project.  The hike was about a mile each way.  Hiking it early was a good idea because even though I was in and out before 8:30am, the heat and humidity were already starting to have an impact.

In summary, it felt great to be making progress toward the highpointing goal again.  After being out west for a couple of years, it was exciting to be back in the dense forests that lie to the east.