Hiking at Poverty Point Reservoir State Park, LA

June 21, 2022

I wanted to go hiking along the trails in the woods instead of the trails in the sun. I want the cool woods instead of the bight sunshine beating down on me.

Poverty Point State Park has a few trails in the woods: Jesse James Trail, Outlaw Trail, Hardbottom Trail, and Macon Ridge Trail.

We walked over to the Hardbottom Trail and began our hike. The Hardbottom Trail runs along a cypress swamp. The swamp has dried up a bit. You can easily see the cypress knees. In parts of the trail, we had to walk very carefully since there was poison oak/ivy growing in amongst the Virginia Creeper that was creeping over the path.

The Hardbottom Trail intersected with the Outlaw Trail, which took us to the Macon Ridge Trail.

The Macon Ridge Trail was right next to the Bayou Macon. We watched turtles and fish in the muddy water of the Bayou Macon. We were confident that one of the fish was a channel catfish. The other fish looked like it had yellow scales, so we wondered if it was a carp.

Cypress trees lined the Bayou Macon.

We didn’t see any alligators on the banks of the Bayou Macon. We did walk along part of the trail that had a dead end sign on it.

We saw a couple of frogs. Once the frogs hopped out of the path, they were almost impossible to see in the brown leaves. We also saw a couple of egrets, but I wasn’t able to get a picture of them.

We head back from the dead end and hiked along the trail.

A tree had fallen across the trail in one section. Bruce and I ducked under and stepped over the limbs to continue our walk on the trail. The fallen tree was covered in wild grapes.

The Macon Ridge Trail brought us in a loop to the RV campsites the Hardbottom Trail started from.

It was a fun hike and we decided the right choice had been made to leave Nox behind. We are certain she would’ve been in the poison ivy/oak.