Side trip: PANIC! on Lake Superior, or The Near-Wreck of the Old Honda Accord (600')

The legend lives on from highpointers on down
of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee.
The lake road, it is said, never gives up her dead
when the skies of mid-August turn gloomy.

The car was the pride of a hiker named Stoat,
loaded down with her worldly possessions.
As mid-size sedans go, it was bigger than most
with driver and Pokemon well-seasoned.

They were headed southwest from that old raven's nest
Eagle Mountain, a hill they'd been climbing
As they turned from the forest to highway they saw
they'd got down with impeccable timing.

Highpoint #22: Mt. Marcy, NY (5343')

I spent the next morning resting and looking up directions to the Adirondacks. After some deliberation, I decided to circumvent Albany and take the long way around to I-87, since I'd set aside the whole day for getting there. So I set out from my motel around noon, under intermittent rain, and headed north. I clipped the corner of Vermont, passed through the lovely towns of Waloomsac and Schaghticoke (I pity the kindergartners who grow up learning to write those names). and finally hit the interstate near Malta. An hour's drive later, just after Queensbury, the road entered Adirondack State Park and all the usual highway services disappeared--including cell.

Like Maine's similarly vast and remote Baxter Park, Adirondack State Park is practically a state unto itself. It encompasses the entire Adirondack range, including six million acres--an area the size of New Hampshire--of mountains, valleys, rivers, lakes, lodges, camps, small towns, ski resorts, and sawmills. Yes, I said sawmills. This weird park is a patchwork of public and private land, the latter being  home to over 100 towns (though none large enough to get a proper phone signal) and 130,000 year-round residents.

The Adirondacks themselves are an anomaly among the Eastern mountains. They’re not Appalachian, for one—they were raised up from the Canadian Shield in a separate, ongoing orogeny. Unlike their neighbors to the east, they’re still growing, so when aliens arrive in a million years to sift through the remains of our civilization, they might well wonder why this blog was so concerned with little old eroded Mt. Washington rather than the cloud-splitting Adirondack High Peaks that loom over it.

Tahawus, or Cloud-Splitter, is already the Native American name for Mt. Marcy, and a far superior name in my opinion. Mt. Marcy sounds like a friendly little hill you’d take the kids up for a picnic (“Come on, Billy, smile! We’re going to Mt. Marcy!”); the deep, savage vowels of Tahawus are much more fitting for the wind-battered behemoth I climbed. The high point of New York, Mt. Marcy is also home to the state’s only region of alpine tundra—and the weather to match it.

Side Trip: Mississippi and Ohio Rivers (280')

After Taum Sauk, I headed east to Cape Girardeau, MO to visit my cousin. Situated on the shores of the Mississippi, the Cape is the central metropolis of an area of very small towns—or, to stretch a metaphor, a medium-sized fish in a pond of minnows. On my way into town, in the early afternoon, I hit traffic for the first time in several days. The town was large enough to offer a full complement of civic conveniences, so I grabbed some lunch, then holed up in the (surprisingly nice) local library until my cousin got off work.

Just as the Deep South differed from the Appalachians, so too did Missouri from the both of them. The accents were gone, for one, and the place-names took a sharp swing towards the bland. I was still solidly in the Bible Belt, though, with all that implies: pro-life signs along the road, Christian pop playing overhead in stores, churches all over the place, and so on. This is the Midwest, I suppose.

My cousin showed up around dinnertime. While we dined (at an Italian place in the old town), we caught each other up on our lives. She lives in Cape Girardeau, but works 45 minutes away as an engineer at a plant in [Bloomfield?]. Hardly an ideal living situation, but it’s the norm for a spread-out place like southeastern Missouri. She took the job—her first out of college—hoping to be promoted and reassigned somewhere more urban, but after spending a year in town she’s come to like the place… even with all the flooding.

Highpoint #11: Britton Hill, FL (345')

The four-hour drive down to Florida was uneventful. Cheaha Mountain was fairly remote, so I passed through several small towns before I rejoined the interstate. Forestry seems to be a major industry in northern Alabama; for a while I followed a flatbed truck piled high with raw pine logs.

Around 3:30 in the afternoon (on Central time now), just after crossing the state line, I spotted a sign for "Florida's Highest Point." I'm surprised the turn was labeled at all, but if any state could be proud of a point less than 400 feet above sea level, it would be the Swamp Sunshine State. So I turned down the road and soon arrived at Lakewood Park, home to the (in)famous Britton Hill.

I hadn't expected much. A slight rise, a few meters' hike, perhaps even a bit of a view. But nope. Lakewood Park was nothing but a roadside park, flat as a pitcher's mound.