2017 Southeast Trip; Part 1 (To Florida)

Back in May of last year I took a trip out to the Southeast region starting with Florida. Usually I'm not a fan of flying but my flight path from Fresno to my layover in Denver is one of the more scenic that I know of in the Continental United States. The snow pack flying east over over the Sierras and the Minarets region was massive after a stormy winter.

Mono Lake in the background and Crowley Lake in the foreground on the eastern slopes of the Sierras entering the Great Basin. Crowley Lake is a reservoir in the Los Angeles Aqueduct Project while Mono Lake is a large salt water body with volcanic islands.

The White Mountains at the state line boundary of California and Nevada. The high peak in the White Mountains is White Mountain Peak at 14,252 feet above sea level.

Traveling eastward into Nevada the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project could be seen to the north of Tonopah and US 95/6. The Crescent Dunes Project was completed in 2015 but was turned off-line for about a year after completion due to leaks in the molten salt tank.

There wasn't much to see in Utah and the Colorado Plateau due to cloud cover but upon entering Colorado I could see Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park.

There was cloud cover over Denver which meant for bumpy conditions but a good portion of the Front Range of the Rockies could be see poking above the clouds.

After a brief layover at Denver International Airport I bordered my flight for Tampa. There wasn't much to be seen out the window as the cloud cover was thick but it cleared up enough by Louisiana to see the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. The Lake Pontchartrain Causeway is about 24 miles in length which carries traffic from I-10 in New Orleans to US 190 on the north side of the lake. The Lake Pontchartrain Causeway southbound lanes were completed in 1956 while the northbound lanes were completed in 1969.

After crossing the Gulf my plane landed in Florida and thus the Southeast began proper. This was a massive trip with about 3,000 miles planned in; Florida, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and South Carolina.

Comments

Paper Highways: The Unbuilt New Orleans Bypass (Proposed I-410)

There are many examples around the United States of proposed freeway corridors in urban areas that never saw the light of day for one reason or another. They all fall somewhere in between the little-known and the infamous and from the mundane to the spectacular. One of the more obscure and interesting examples of such a project is the short-lived idea to construct a southern beltway for the New Orleans metropolitan area in the 1960s and 70s. Greater New Orleans and its surrounding area grew rapidly in the years after World War II, as suburban sprawl encroached on the historically rural downriver parishes around the city. In response to the development of the region’s Westbank and the emergence of communities in St. Charles and St. John the Baptist Parishes as viable suburban communities during this period, regional planners began to consider concepts for new infrastructure projects to serve this growing population. The idea for a circular freeway around the southern perimeter of t

Hernando de Soto Bridge (Memphis, TN)

The newest of the bridges that span the lower Mississippi River at Memphis, the Hernando de Soto Bridge was completed in 1973 and carries Interstate 40 between downtown Memphis and West Memphis, AR. The bridge’s signature M-shaped superstructure makes it an instantly recognizable landmark in the city and one of the most visually unique bridges on the Mississippi River. As early as 1953, Memphis city planners recommended the construction of a second highway bridge across the Mississippi River to connect the city with West Memphis, AR. The Memphis & Arkansas Bridge had been completed only four years earlier a couple miles downriver from downtown, however it was expected that long-term growth in the metro area would warrant the construction of an additional bridge, the fourth crossing of the Mississippi River to be built at Memphis, in the not-too-distant future. Unlike the previous three Mississippi River bridges to be built the city, the location chosen for this bridge was about two

Memphis & Arkansas Bridge (Memphis, TN)

Like the expansion of the railroads the previous century, the modernization of the country’s highway infrastructure in the early and mid 20th Century required the construction of new landmark bridges along the lower Mississippi River (and nation-wide for that matter) that would facilitate the expected growth in overall traffic demand in ensuing decades. While this new movement had been anticipated to some extent in the Memphis area with the design of the Harahan Bridge, neither it nor its neighbor the older Frisco Bridge were capable of accommodating the sharp rise in the popularity and demand of the automobile as a mode of cross-river transportation during the Great Depression. As was the case 30 years prior, the solution in the 1940s was to construct a new bridge in the same general location as its predecessors, only this time the bridge would be the first built exclusively for vehicle traffic. This bridge, the Memphis & Arkansas Bridge, was completed in 1949 and was the third