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Best Louisiana Road Trips: Three Scenic Drives Into a Louisiana You Didn’t Expect

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By Karen LeBlanc, host of LA64, a Louisiana Travel Show on PBS

The first time I stood on the plateau at Longleaf Vista, looking out over pine ridges rolling toward a horizon twenty miles out, I reached for my phone. Not for a photo. For the map. I needed something official to confirm that I was, in fact, still in Louisiana.

I was. Natchitoches Parish. Sandstone under my boots, buttes and mesas standing up in the middle distance, red dirt on my shoes, and not a single cypress knee in sight.

That moment is why I keep driving this state. I’ve been traveling Louisiana for years now — not all sixty-four parishes yet, though I fully intend to get there — and the stops that stay with me are almost never the ones I planned. They’re the ones where the landscape quietly contradicts everything the rest of the country assumes about us, and a fair amount of what I assumed too.

We have hills. We have bald eagles nesting above the largest manmade lake in the South. We have a national forest that was cut down to nothing a century ago, replanted by hand by young men in a Depression-era work program, and grew back into one of the most biologically rich landscapes on the continent. We have a hundred-year-old highway built to be admired at twenty-five miles an hour, running through towns that still deserve exactly that speed.

None of that made it onto the postcard.

What fascinates me, as someone who cannot look at a place without asking how it shaped the people in it, is that none of this is a secret up here. The folks in Sabine Parish will tell you they’re from the hills and mean it. They’re just not in the habit of bragging, which is very Louisiana of us.

So here are three road trips into the Louisiana that surprised me most, and not an interstate exit ramp among them. One climbs into piney hill country most visitors don’t believe exists. One follows a seventeen-mile ridge through a national forest. One takes the slow road across Acadiana, back when getting there slowly was the entire point.

Pack snacks. Cell service is a rumor in places. Let’s go.

Table of Contents

Wait, Louisiana Has Hills?

We do, and we have geology to thank for it.

Tucked under the western and northwestern corner of the state is a structural high called the Sabine Uplift, sometimes called the Sabine Arch. It reaches across parts of Bossier, Caddo, DeSoto, Natchitoches, Red River, and Sabine parishes. It is not a mountain. There is no summit, no scenic pull-off with a bronze plaque, no gift shop selling t-shirts that say I Survived The Sabine Uplift.

What there is, instead, is a feeling. You drive west out of central Louisiana and somewhere past Natchitoches the road stops behaving. It starts to rise and fall. The soil turns red. The bottomland hardwoods thin out and the pines take over, standing up straight in rows and rows and rows like they’ve been called to attention. You crest something. You go down the other side of it. The landscape has opinions now.

As a Louisiana native, I find this genuinely disorienting in the best way. As a travel journalist who has spent a career watching how geography shapes people, I find it explains almost everything about this corner of the state: the timber economy, the sawmill towns, the frontier stubbornness, the fact that the folks up here will tell you they’re from the hills and mean it.

Elevation shapes culture. It always has. Here’s where to go feel it.

Road Trip One: The Sabine Uplift Loop

The route: Natchitoches, west on LA 6 to Many, south on US 171 toward Florien and Fisher, then LA 191 along Toledo Bend, and north toward Logansport.

Give yourself a full day, or better, a weekend. This loop hands you history, hill country, reservoir views, pine forest, and the clearest sense you’ll get of how the Sabine Uplift quietly rearranged this corner of Louisiana.

LA 191 and the Toledo Bend Forest Scenic Byway

If you drive one road on this list, make it this one.

The Toledo Bend Forest Scenic Byway runs down the Louisiana side of Toledo Bend Reservoir, beginning at Logansport and ending at the Toledo Bend Dam on the Texas line. Toledo Bend Lake Country puts the route at roughly seventy-six miles of rolling hills, pine and hardwood forest, farmland, and lake views. The byway picks up mileage in both DeSoto and Sabine parishes.

And the lake it hugs is no small pond. Toledo Bend covers about 186,000 acres, which makes it the largest manmade lake in the South and, by most counts, the fifth largest in the country. Bass fishermen already know this. Bald eagles already know this. The rest of us drive up and blink at it like we’ve discovered something.

What surprises visitors most is the terrain. There are bluffs. There are overlooks. There is a stretch near the San Patricio overlook where you pull over, cut the engine, and hear absolutely nothing except pine needles doing whatever pine needles do in wind. South Toledo Bend State Park sits on small bluffs above the water and is a nesting ground for bald eagles, which is one of those sentences I still can’t quite believe I get to write about Louisiana.

If you swing north toward Logansport, you’re also within reach of Grand Cane, the little DeSoto Parish village that saved its own Main Street. It’s a short detour and an object lesson in what a determined small town can do with a few historic storefronts and no intention of disappearing.

LA 6 and the Royal Road Through No Man’s Land

Now for the layered part.

Louisiana Highway 6 runs east to west from Natchitoches through Many toward the Texas line, and in doing so it traces the corridor of El Camino Real de los Tejas, the Spanish royal road that once connected Mexico City to Natchitoches. Sabine Parish sits at the northernmost reach of it. The road’s Louisiana terminus is Los Adaes State Historic Site in Robeline, and it passes through Fort Jesup State Historic Site near Many, where a garrison was established in 1822 under a young officer named Zachary Taylor who would later find other work.

Highway 171 carries the north-south leg. Together they mark the edge of the territory Louisiana calls No Man’s Land, or the Neutral Strip. Between 1806 and 1822, Spain and the United States both claimed this ground, agreed on nothing, and solved the problem by pulling their troops out entirely and letting the place raise itself. What moved in was exactly who you’d expect. Outlaws, deserters, squatters, opportunists, and a handful of people who simply preferred a country with no government in it.

That history is not a museum exhibit here. It’s an identity. The parish throws an entire festival about it every fall in Florien, and I’ve spent a weekend inside it, sipping sarsaparilla and watching staged gunfights outside a saloon facade. If you want the full picture of what this stretch of Louisiana does with its lawless past, read my dispatch from the Sabine Free State Festival.

Also along this corridor: the Choctaw-Apache Tribe of Ebarb, one of Louisiana’s largest Native communities, which welcomes visitors to its annual spring powwow. Explore Louisiana’s Sabine Parish guide is a good place to check current dates before you plan around it.

US 171: The Spine Road Through Sawmill Country

US 171 is the practical backbone of this loop, running north and south through Many, Florien, Fisher, and Zwolle, with side roads branching toward the lake and the pine uplands.

Fisher is the stop I’d tell my own family not to skip. It’s a preserved company sawmill town, and walking it is like reading a business plan written in architecture: the commissary, the mill office, the opera house, the neat rows of worker housing, all of it built by one timber company for one purpose. Louisiana’s virgin longleaf forests came down through towns exactly like this one, which makes Fisher a strangely honest place to stand before you drive into a national forest that had to be replanted afterward.

Zwolle brings its own layered story, with Spanish and Native heritage folded into a tamale tradition that has its own festival. This is a corner of Louisiana where the food tells you the history faster than any historical marker will.

Road Trip Two: The Longleaf Trail Scenic Byway

The route: Forest Road 59 through Kisatchie National Forest, connecting LA 117 and LA 119, about five and a half miles south of the Derry exit off I-49.

Seventeen miles. Posted at 35 miles per hour. Which sounds like a punishment until you understand that the speed limit here is not traffic control, it’s an instruction.

The Longleaf Trail Scenic Byway follows a high ridge through the Kisatchie Hills in Natchitoches Parish, and the U.S. Forest Service describes the terrain as exceptionally rugged for Louisiana, ranging from roughly 120 to 400 feet in elevation. Vistas along the road include mesas, buttes, and sandstone outcrops backed by longleaf pines. Elevations around 360 feet are common along the trail and open up views of more than twenty miles.

The road itself has a story. The Civilian Conservation Corps cut it as a single lane around 1935, and the modernization didn’t begin until 1972. So when you’re driving it, you’re driving a Depression-era public works project through a forest that was also, largely, a Depression-era public works project.

Longleaf Vista and the Little Grand Canyon

Longleaf Vista Recreation Area is the payoff, and it’s the plateau I was standing on when I reached for my map. It is surrounded on three sides by the Kisatchie Hills Wilderness, roughly 8,700 acres that locals have long called the Little Grand Canyon. I will not oversell that nickname. It is not the Grand Canyon. It is, however, a genuine plateau in a state that is supposedly sea level, and standing up there looking out over rocky eroded hills and an unbroken canopy does something to your sense of where you are.

I hiked the 1.5-mile interpretive loop with Albert Brazzel, District Ranger for Kisatchie National Forest, who has clearly had this conversation before. “The people even in this state don’t know of the hidden treasures that they have out here,” he told me, which is about as gentle a scolding as a Louisianian can deliver.

He described this stretch as probably the most concentrated high points in the state. He’s right, and the specific numbers are worth carrying with you: the Forest Service puts the highest point in Kisatchie National Forest at 410 feet, while Louisiana’s actual high point is Driskill Mountain over in Bienville Parish, topping out at 535 feet. Neither figure will impress anyone from Colorado. Both figures will completely rearrange what a Louisiana native thinks she knows about her own state.

Brazzel also made a point that stuck with me. Nearly the whole national forest is hikeable, he explained, precisely because we don’t have the extreme terrain of a mountain region. This paved loop is about as rugged as it gets. Everything else opens up to horses, bicycles, ATVs, and motorcycles on multi-use trails. In other words: the thing Louisiana lacks in drama, it makes up for in access.

The Trail That Was Built by Hand

Here is my favorite detail on the entire drive, and you would walk right past it.

The rock walkways threading through Longleaf Vista were originally constructed in the late 1950s and through the 1960s. In the 1970s, the Youth Conservation Corps came on with the Forest Service and laid these stones by hand. And the rock is local. Collected right here on site.

So the path under your boots is made of the hill you’re standing on, placed there by teenagers on a summer work program half a century ago. I am a sucker for this kind of thing. It’s the anthropology of a walking trail: somebody’s grandfather, sunburned and nineteen, hauling sandstone up a ridge so that strangers could one day look at a view.

The Pine That Holds a Culture Together

Kisatchie National Forest spans more than 604,000 acres across seven parishes in central and north Louisiana, divided into five ranger districts and managed by the U.S. Forest Service. It holds one of the largest concentrations of longleaf pine in the southeastern United States.

I walked into the Kisatchie Hills Wilderness with Forest Supervisor Lisa Lewis, who talks about these trees the way some people talk about their kids. The longleaf, she explained, is “really a fire adaptive, iconic species here.” The name is not marketing. The needles can reach a foot and a half long. Young trees put on long shoots, run an extensive tap root system, and carry a huge terminal bud that elongates and starts growing in spring, which is the single most photogenic moment in the life of a Louisiana pine and almost nobody knows to look for it.

The forest you’re driving through is not the forest that was here. Lisa laid out the history plainly. When railroads arrived in this part of Louisiana in the late 1800s and early 1900s, sawmills sprang up everywhere, and the vast virgin longleaf forests were cut over. By the mid to late 1920s, this was cut-over land. Most of what stands here today was replanted in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps, part of Roosevelt’s New Deal effort to pull the country out of the Great Depression.

Which reframes the whole drive. You are not looking at wilderness. You are looking at a repair job, eighty-odd years along, and it worked.

The longleaf ecosystem is often described as one of the most diverse in North America, with conservation groups frequently ranking it second only to the Amazon rainforest in species diversity. That specific comparison gets repeated more often than it gets sourced, so I’ll leave it as the shorthand it is. What’s not in dispute is who lives here: the threatened red-cockaded woodpecker, the gopher tortoise, the Louisiana pine snake.

And the people. Twice a year, weavers from the Coushatta Tribe come to the forest to harvest longleaf pine needles for basketry, an ancestral tradition that has outlasted the sawmills that tried to take the trees. That, to me, is the whole story of this drive compressed into one act. A tree that was nearly erased is now an artistic muse, a culture bearer, an economic driver, and an ecosystem. If you want more on how Louisiana hands its crafts forward, spend time with cypress wood carver Henry Watson, who works in a different material with the same stubborn devotion.

Road Trip Three: The Old Spanish Trail Through Acadiana

The route: US 90 and LA 182 west from New Orleans through the bayou parishes, Acadiana, and the rice belt to the Sabine River.

Before I-10 taught us all to blow through south Louisiana at seventy-five miles an hour, the Old Spanish Trail invited us to slow down. It carried tourists, trade, gossip, and roadside culture through the middle of everything, and it built Main Streets that were designed to be seen from a car window at twenty-five miles per hour.

You can still drive it. You just have to want to.

I’ve given this road its own full feature — The Old Spanish Trail in Louisiana: A Highway 90 Road Trip — where I walk the Chitimacha mounds at Idlewild in Patterson with Captain Caviar himself and follow the Teche past live oaks the size of cathedrals. What follows here is the road-trip version: the route, the stops, and why this hundred-year-old highway still rewards a slow car.

Two Roads, One Name (and a Lot of Confusion)

Let me clear something up, because I ran into it myself and it trips up nearly everyone.

There are two Old Spanish Trails in American history and they have nothing to do with each other.

One is the Old Spanish National Historic Trail, a pack-mule trade route blazed in 1829 between Santa Fe and Los Angeles. It crosses Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah. Louisiana is not on it, has never been on it, and will not be on it.

The other, ours, is the Old Spanish Trail Auto Highway. Organized in 1915 at a meeting in Mobile, Alabama, and largely built between 1919 and 1929, it was one of the great named highways of the era before federal route numbers existed. It ran roughly 2,750 miles from St. Augustine, Florida, to San Diego, California, across eight states, and in 1927 much of it was absorbed into US 90. The name borrowed Spanish colonial romance, old mission stories, and forts and scenery as a kind of early heritage tourism brand, which makes it one of the first destination marketing campaigns in American history. I find that hilarious and also deeply relatable.

In Louisiana, it isn’t one clean modern highway. It’s a layered road story. Much of it became US 90. Older alignments survive as LA 182, as business routes, as Main Streets, and as local streets still carrying the name Old Spanish Trail. Lafayette Travel’s OST page documents the corridor through Lafayette Parish, including Broussard’s Main Street and Scott’s Cameron Street.

My rule of thumb: follow US 90 where it exists, but get off it and onto the old Main Street alignments wherever you can. That’s where the road culture still lives. I untangle the rest of the romance — including why Kit Carson keeps turning up in stories he has no business being in — in my full Old Spanish Trail feature.

Where to Stop Between the Atchafalaya and the Sabine

Going east to west, the Louisiana corridor enters near the Pearl River, reaches New Orleans, then bends through the bayou parishes and Acadiana.

Des Allemands and Raceland. Less polished, which is exactly the point. The OST’s real Louisiana drama was the engineering problem of getting automobiles across swamp and bayou. This stretch still gives you that road-over-water feeling: fishing camps, seafood, bridges, working landscapes.

The Bayou Lafourche corridor, Houma and Thibodaux. Shrimping, sugarcane, oilfield work, and Cajun and Creole foodways overlapping along a road. Ask anyone over seventy how the highway changed life on the bayou and settle in.

Morgan City and Berwick. The Atchafalaya crossing, and one of the strongest stops on the whole route. Everything about this stretch is a story about bridges, river commerce, cypress, seafood, and the sheer nerve it took to run a highway at the edge of a basin.

Franklin. Live oaks, Bayou Teche, and old Louisiana quiet. A good place to think about the fact that the auto road was just the newest layer over much older water routes.

Jeanerette. Sugarcane and mills, working heritage rather than polished heritage. The Bicentennial Park and Museum lays out the sugarcane story.

New Iberia. Possibly the richest single stop in Louisiana. Shadows-on-the-Teche, the Conrad Rice Mill, Avery Island with the TABASCO factory and museum, and Jungle Gardens, a 170-acre botanical park and bird sanctuary. Hot sauce, salt domes, rice, sugarcane, literature, and architecture in one town.

Broussard. An Official OST City since 2019, with replica Old Spanish Trail signs standing along LA 182 on Main Street. Older travel materials described Broussard as having one of the three largest sugar mills in Louisiana back when its population was around 600. Walk the Victorian houses on Main and pick up boudin. You know what to do.

Lafayette. The cultural anchor. My favorite historical detail: early OST travel guides warned motorists that Lafayette was difficult to navigate because of its jogs, turns, and curves. Nearly a hundred years later I would like to report that this is still true and I love it here anyway.

Scott. Boudin country, and home to an actual street named Old Spanish Trail Road. A historic general store at Cayret Street and Highway 90 carried the slogan “Where the West Begins,” which is the kind of phrase that turns a small town into a threshold.

Crowley. Rice country, with a historic downtown and the Grand Opera House of the South. Local OST history buffs will tell you the First National Bank building was known as the skyscraper of the South, which tells you exactly how much confidence rice money used to carry.

Jennings. Oil, rice, and art. The Zigler Art Museum’s collection spans six centuries of European and American work and rotates Louisiana artist exhibitions, which is a genuinely unexpected thing to find on a rice-belt highway.

Welsh, Iowa, Roanoke. Not a stop so much as a sequence. Rice fields, irrigation canals, grain elevators, roadside cafés, and horizon.

Lake Charles. Shell Beach Drive and the historic districts give the corridor its elegant chapter.

Sulphur, Vinton, Toomey. The last Louisiana miles before the Sabine River, where Cajun and Creole Louisiana hands you off to Texas. A proper ending.

Hungry along the way? My guide to the best general stores in Louisiana still worth a stop maps neatly onto this route, and if you want to sleep on a working crawfish farm somewhere in the middle of it, Crawfish Haven and Mrs. Rose’s will take good care of you.

Rayne: Where the Old Road Gets a Party

Rayne is where this drive stops being history and starts being a Saturday.

You may know Rayne as the Frog Capital of the World, a title earned through a bullfrog export business that ran from the late 1800s into the 1970s and has since been immortalized in murals all over downtown. Rayne is also the City of Murals, which means you can stand on one street corner and be looked at by an alarming number of painted amphibians. I say this with love.

But Rayne also carries the Old Spanish Trail story further than almost anywhere else on the route. Acadia Parish Tourism calls the corridor the Route 66 of the South and identifies Rayne as the first Official Old Spanish Trail City in the country. The town has since been joined by Broussard, Lafayette, Crowley, and others, with eight Official OST Cities in Louisiana today.

Every year Rayne throws Old Spanish Trail Day, centered on Depot Square and nearby downtown venues. Recent editions have brought music, food, a history program, a merchants’ market, a car show, and a French Table, all of it built around the memory of a coast-to-coast road. Check current dates before you plan, because small-town festivals move.

The French Table is the part that gets me. It’s a gathering where people show up to speak French over coffee, keeping a language alive one conversation at a time, and I’ve written about the French Tables of Louisiana because they are one of the most quietly radical things happening in this state. Put a French Table next to a car show next to a frog mural and you have the entire thesis of the Old Spanish Trail in one town square.

This road was never just asphalt. It was a cultural seam stitched through bayous, rice fields, sugar towns, French-speaking communities, seafood country, old rail corridors, and Main Streets. Every town gave the highway its own accent.

Rayne is simply the town that decided to say it out loud.

Know Before You Go

  • Fill up before the forest. Gas stations thin out fast on Forest Road 59 and along the Toledo Bend byway. Top off in Natchitoches, Many, or Provencal.
  • Expect patchy cell service. Download offline maps for the Kisatchie stretch. Your navigation app will get confident and then get quiet.
  • The Longleaf Trail Scenic Byway is free. No entrance fee. Longleaf Vista has restrooms, picnic seating, and the interpretive loop, which involves some stairs.
  • Wear real shoes on the interpretive loop. It’s 1.5 miles and rock-paved, not a boardwalk. Lovely, uneven, worth it.
  • Best light is late. The overlooks at Longleaf Vista and along Toledo Bend both reward a sunset arrival. Plan the drive so you finish there, not start there.
  • Spring for the terminal bud, fall for the festivals. Longleaf pines put on their growth in spring; Sabine Parish and Acadia Parish stack their heritage events into fall.
  • Watch the seasons in the national forest. Hunting seasons, prescribed burns, and weather closures happen. Check current conditions with the Kisatchie Ranger District before you commit to a hike.
  • Book ahead at the lake. Toledo Bend cabins and state park sites fill during bass tournaments and holiday weekends.
  • On the Old Spanish Trail, get off US 90. The four-lane will move you. The old LA 182 and Main Street alignments will show you something.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best scenic drive in Louisiana?

The Longleaf Trail Scenic Byway is widely considered Louisiana’s finest scenic drive. It runs 17 miles along Forest Road 59 through the Kisatchie Hills in Kisatchie National Forest, connecting LA 117 and LA 119, with elevations ranging from about 120 to 400 feet and views of sandstone outcrops, mesas, and buttes.

Does Louisiana have hills?

Yes. Western and northwestern Louisiana sit atop a geologic structure called the Sabine Uplift, which produces genuine rolling pine hill country across Sabine, DeSoto, Natchitoches, Caddo, Bossier, and Red River parishes. Louisiana’s highest point is Driskill Mountain in Bienville Parish at 535 feet, and the highest point in Kisatchie National Forest is 410 feet.

How long is the Longleaf Trail Scenic Byway?

It is approximately 17 miles, posted at 35 miles per hour, located about 5.5 miles south of the Derry exit off Interstate 49 in Natchitoches Parish. There is no fee to drive it.

Where does the Old Spanish Trail run in Louisiana?

The Old Spanish Trail Auto Highway corridor enters Louisiana near the Pearl River, passes through New Orleans, and continues west through Des Allemands, Raceland, Morgan City, Franklin, Jeanerette, New Iberia, Broussard, Lafayette, Scott, Rayne, Crowley, Jennings, Lake Charles, Sulphur, and Vinton toward the Texas line. Most of the route is now US 90, with older alignments surviving as LA 182 and small-town Main Streets.

Is the Old Spanish Trail in Louisiana the same as the Old Spanish National Historic Trail?

No. They share a name and nothing else. The Old Spanish National Historic Trail is an 1829 pack-mule trade route between Santa Fe and Los Angeles crossing six southwestern states, and Louisiana is not among them. Louisiana’s Old Spanish Trail is a 1915 transcontinental auto highway from St. Augustine to San Diego that was largely absorbed into US 90 in 1927.

How big is Toledo Bend Reservoir?

Toledo Bend covers roughly 186,000 acres, making it the largest manmade lake in the South and one of the largest in the United States. The Toledo Bend Forest Scenic Byway runs along its Louisiana shore on LA 191 from Logansport to the Toledo Bend Dam.

How many acres is Kisatchie National Forest?

More than 604,000 acres across seven parishes in central and north Louisiana, divided into five ranger districts. It is Louisiana’s only national forest and holds one of the largest concentrations of longleaf pine in the southeastern United States.

Can you do all three of these road trips in one trip?

You can, though I’d give it four to five days. Natchitoches makes a natural base for the Sabine Uplift loop and the Longleaf Trail Byway, since both are within an hour. The Old Spanish Trail is a separate southern swing best driven west to east or east to west in its own right, with an overnight around Lafayette or New Iberia.

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