Driskill Mountain, Louisiana 535 feet

Climbed 11/03/2009

We drove down to Driskill Mountain from Hot Springs, Arkansas. (The "piney hills" of northern Louisiana are much closer — in distance, topography, and culture — to the "timberlands" of southern Arkansas than to the Louisiana Delta cities of New Orleans and Baton Rouge.) We spent the afternoon driving along rural highways through the woods and small towns, following our GPS south to the Louisiana town of Arcadia. We arrived at the Mt. Zion Presbyterian Church about 4:00 p.m.; on that autumn day you could already see the sun starting to set. The trail started behind the church next to the cemetery.

Setting out on the trail from the Driskill Memorial cemetery

The weather was warm and clear, but the trail was still muddy from heavy rains the week before. We followed the trail this way and that through the woods, struggling to match the hiking instructions in our highpoint book to the branching trails in front of us. ("Is this the one where we're supposed to take the right fork? You think that's the rusty gate?") We skirted the deepest mud puddles and watched carefully to keep our faces out of the spider webs strung across the trail. We reached the summit after about a mile.

The summit register

The summit cairn

By this time the sun was definitely going down. The autumn leaves glowed golden in the rays of the setting sun.

Autumn sunset in northern Louisiana

We hustled back down the trail and drove back to Arkansas as darkness fell.