I ran through Sam Correro’s Mississippi Hill Country trail. I was based in Pontotoc for my annual trip to pay land taxes so I took a couple of days to run the trails.
Due to the recent talk of gang activity in Batesville, I picked up the trail in Paris with is between Pontotoc and Batesville.
I used the maps for planning and then used the rally style tulips in the Jeep. I cut the strips and taped them down to my old Stevens road rally reader board. I used my Terratrip rally odometer for mileage. Having a resettable odo is very helpful for following the instructions.
It appears that he used GPS to get his mileages as I had a little trouble finding a factor to match his numbers. The errors I had are consistent for a rally measured with GPS. The GPS chooses a straight line between readings for mileage measurement while the Terratrip follows the curves in the road. For straight sections and square turns this matches fine. When the roads are curvy error creeps in. However, the error was always small and easy to dial out.
Instead of staying overnight at the end of the southbound run, I turned around and drove part of the course back north. The last part is kinda dull so if you plan to turn around I suggest doing so after hitting the pavement near the end of the southbound run.
I did skip one section of road that was marked as rough and dangerous. The road was really muddy and steep. Since I was alone with little recovery equipment I elected to take the bypass marked on the map. When I found the other end, I set up my odo to match and continued following the route.
On the northbound leg, I again stopped short of Batesville and headed due east to Pontotoc. I ended up finding the town of Taylor which was worth the trip just to see that.
Even having grown up in north Mississippi, I was surprised at how rural the state is. Sam’s route follows many forest and farm roads with very few houses along the way.
I wish I had made more photos of the various “No Trespassing” signs I saw. The was everything from the hand painted misspelled signs to the fancy laser cut stainless steel signs on the hunting lease lands. I got the feeling that the principal philosophy was:
This land is my land
This land is not your land
Pictures are below
