Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

January 12, 2025

412m

Dallas / Possum Kingdon Lake, TX

Johnson Peak is surrounded almost 360 degrees by Possum Kingdom Lake about 200 km west of Dallas in the middle of nowhere in Texas. This peak does rise above the surrounding landscape by (barely) more than 100 m prominence and that’s the sole reason how I noticed it. Over the past few years I’ve had several layovers in DFW airport and I went to the Peakbagger app almost every time to search for some illusive P100m objectives that could potentially be bagged. I’ve already done the Texan high point back in 2017 but that’s on the far western corner of the state, and in the areas next to Dallas there aren’t many options. Johnson Peak is actually the closest to the airport and can be done fairly easily by renting a car. This time I had almost 12 hours of time (in daytime) and I finally decided to pull the trigger, as otherwise spending the entire day in the airport would be very boring and unproductive. I made the decision extremely randomly and only informed Erica after I had already booked the car rental.

I was still not 100% convinced until I saw several vehicles rented at about 50 USD per day on Expedia. The rental company was Easirent which I had never heard about, but this price was attractive enough to give it a shot. In retrospect I should have researched a bit more about this rental company but we had the entire day and the price was rather insignificant (for one day only), so I couldn’t be that careful. Upon arrival in Dallas-Fort Worth airport we exited and took the shuttle service to the “car rental center” which was surprisingly far away. We were now back in winter in the northern hemisphere and it was quite cold. The forecast was calling for -3 degrees Celsius and I thought it was correct. I then learnt that Easirent was not actually associated with the airport but locates 10 minutes away independently in the city of Irvine. There were only a few receptionists working in Hertz at 6:30 am so I reached out and learnt that Easirent actually offered free shuttle services every 15-30 minutes so that’s not too bad. The Google Map indicated their office would open at 7 am and I had booked our rental at 7:30 am. Starting from 7:10 am I had been standing outside in the cold waiting for the elusive shuttle, and it eventually came about half an hour later. During the time I finally did some research about Easirent. The ratings and comments were harsh but honestly I thought it wasn’t that terrible.

The shuttle to Easirent office was actually quite long which made me think that we needed at least an additional hour of buffer time for the return, but that’s okay as time wouldn’t be our problem on this day. The receptionists were also not nearly as rude as people’s comments indicated. They surely weren’t smiling and I did have issues understanding their Texan English but we got the job done fairly fluently. They were insisting on me providing an electronic copy of my insurance (which I didn’t have), but I showed my Roadside assist card and got by without having to ask my parents to take a picture of my car insurance and send to me, which was really nice. The entire paper work process took about 15 minutes and then we got our Nissan car. This was actually a very good car and drove very easily. While driving west from the airport I only thought about one thing, that how good was their infrastructure compared to ours in Vancouver. Dallas isn’t even the biggest American city and I cannot imagine how New York looks like.

The driving westwards was actually quite straightforward and we were able to cruise at 75 mph or above for the most part. The speed limits for those smaller roads were honestly too high for my comfort, that I ended up driving at or below the limit for a lot of that. This is Texas, that you do your own shits and take care of your own safety. I liked this kind of culture much more than the west where we were given too many rules by the authorities. Regarding Johnson Peak itself I had some mixed information whether it’s on private property or not. I thought it would definitely require some degree of trespassing (and of course I did not tell Erica anything about this part), but it ended up being okay. The restricted side turned out to be the southern (shorter) approach but the standard way from the NE worked just fine.

We parked at the designated trail-head and right off the bat I noticed there’s no warning against trespassing. That’s great, as this is actually quite a serious thing to do in Texas. The hike itself was rather boring and the several viewpoints along the way were rather mediocre. The trail was very muddy though, so the weather warning given by American Airline was actually correct. Dallas must have had some recent storms as otherwise the area should be very dry. Our shoes were coated with a thick layer of mud even after a few minutes spent on this trail. We basically followed the signed directions all the way to the very summit and encountered no issue whatsoever. We also did not encounter any other hiker even though there’s another vehicle parked, which was gone by the time we descended. The round trip distance was over 5 km and the time was 1 hour 16 minutes. Erica was obviously not very stoked about this objective which was understandable, and was mostly calling and texting on her phone. Nevertheless it was great to bag another P100m objective while seeing part of the Possum Kingdom Lake.

After completing the hike I determined that we still had some extra time so we drove west to the end of this peninsula at Sandy Beach. There’s nobody on the beach and it was windy and cold, but the scenery was nice. We relaxed there for a while and then took turn driving back to Dallas. We were actually not doing that great on time so only stopped for some fast gas station food. The returning of the car was fairly slow but was without event, and then we took the two consecutive shuttles back to the airport. We eventually got to the terminal for the final flight to Vancouver with 1.5 hours of spare, and eventually got back home at 10:30 pm.