Couturie Forest

This guide to Couturie Forest in New Orleans starts with a correction: Laborde Mountain, the city's highest point at about forty three feet, is riprap hauled from the Interstate 610 excavation pit, dumped under oaks where there was barely land before. It traces the forest to 1938, when Depression-era Works Progress Administration crews, funded by a bequest from businessman Rene Couturie, turned scrub and swamp into an arboretum by hand, tree by tree. Listen for the birds moving through the canopy as you walk the ridge underfoot.