#3: [22-Nov-13]

#2: [16-Jan-11]

#1: [04-Jun-01]

26-Jan-2025 --

A confluence visit was all but required during the course of a long day trip to McCurtain County — the last Oklahoma county (of 77) that had yet to be visited by Jack and I. Conveniently enough it has a confluence of its own, and an easy roadside one at that! Bagging 34N 95W would be a great first stop on our rapid circuit of the county, and formally kick off the confluencing careers of some friends who came along for the ride.

After a couple hours of pleasant driving through rural southeast Oklahoma, we crossed into McCurtain County from the west on US 70 (9 miles/14.5 km west of 34N 95W). Interestingly, there wasn't a sign marking the county boundary (as there typically are on state and federally maintained highways) — not something I'd ordinarily note, but this was a long-anticipated mapgeek milestone and it would've been cool to pose with a sign of that sort. Fortunately we'd been carefully watching our location and marked the invisible boundary crossing with a somewhat languid fist pump and "woo": 77/77 counties down, Oklahoma was complete! The first stop on our victory tour awaited us only a few miles down the highway.

We passed through the towns of Valliant and Millerton during our final approach to 34N 95W, both fairly quiet and unassuming on that chilly Sunday afternoon. I found out after the fact that Millerton is home to the oldest surviving church building in Oklahoma, built in the 1840s. It's just under a mile (roughly 1.5 km) southeast of the confluence, perhaps worth checking out for any future visitors. 34N 95W is located beside Hawks Roost Road, 1.5 miles (~2.5 km) due north of US 70. We drove a couple hundred meters north of the target latitude to allow for some much needed leg stretching, and pulled over for our quick stroll.

The tree-lined, roadside nature of this spot reminded Jack and I of our visit to its northwest neighbor 35N 96W, although you can't perfectly zero-meter this point without leaving the pavement. Still, absolutely no bushwhacking required to get within 10 meters of the target. The GPS decimals dwindled and though I could practically smell the exact degree intersection point from behind a patch of evergreen trees that lined the confluence field's fenceline, achieving all zeroes wouldn't be wise today. 1) The barbed wire fence was nestled in the trees (not terribly safe or easy to go through), 2) a couple cars had already passed by since we'd gotten there, and 3) four additional people standing on the side of a rural road is probably a bit of a spectacle. The way I look at it, this flavor of confluence is like a museum exhibit: you can't zero-meter the Mona Lisa, you have to view it from a few arm lengths away.

I had no trouble poking my phone through the trees to get a clear overview picture of 34N 95W, whose field is presumably used for cattle grazing (sadly no bovines were around today). Because the directional photos would have otherwise been inside a tree, I captured those shots a couple steps to the west, including an alternate east-facing view that's obscured by branches (the view we had without sticking our heads through). Speaking of the trees — comparing our photos with very similar pictures from Alfredo B. Remon Mendez's 2011 visit reveals significant tree growth along the fence. Unfortunately I don't think that these particular trees are desirable: to my eyes they resembled eastern red cedar, a species that's considered invasive in Oklahoma. An interesting difference but perhaps par for the course, over a decade having passed since the most recent recorded visit. The weather was decidedly less interesting, with calm conditions under overcast skies and a temperature in the upper 40s (9°C); not adding much variety in that sense for this point, as two of the other three visits also occurred on seemingly dreary cool season days.

Once everyone had gotten their touristy photos of this postcard-worthy destination, we continued further into McCurtain County. In Idabel (12 miles/20 km southeast of the confluence) we swung by the county courthouse, got lunch, and then finished off my last untraveled miles of OK 3's southeast segment down near the Arkansas border. We also made an obligatory drive through Broken Bow, the other city in the county (just north of Idabel) — it's doing relatively well thanks to the area's popularity with summer vacationers from DFW (and is also the setting of a slightly goofy country song that we made sure to put on as we passed by). With January's early evening darkness setting in, we left the area having enjoyed a solid afternoon of sightseeing and confluence catching. Our glorified u-turn was now halfway complete, and it'd be a long (dark) ride back from Broken Bow.