Chemin-A-Haut, Bartholomew

Chemin-A-Haut State Park is off of Highway 425 coming north out of Monroe, Louisiana. Within the park is a boat launch for access to Bayou Bartholomew. About two and a quarter miles up the bayou you reach a left hand channel called Chemin-A-Haut Bayou. If you take this channel and go up a bit, there is a collection of enormous cypress trees. The most famous of these, Castle Tree, is even marked on google maps, and people often photograph themselves inside the cavern created by the trunk. It’s not just Castle Tree though, other cypress along this channel are also huge. Nothing in the area can beat Chemin-A-Haut for the sheer size of the trees. Whether this is because the bayou is free flowing I don’t know, but it’s nice to see trees that were not logged, to see what once was. The route I took was a linear out and back, up to the point of ‘Chem Cutoff Road’ and I turned around there. Some of this channel was kind of brushy, but there were large cypress the whole way up. Amazing.