The highpoint of Anne Arundel County is a small hill dotted with nice homes and some TV towers located near the intersections of the Baltimore-Washington Beltway (MD-295) and highway MD-175, in the city of Jessup. It’s not far from Baltimore-Washington Airport (BWI), but in past visits we’ve usually ignored this highpoint mainly since it was in the opposite direction of our usual travel itinerary. Also, there are actually four highpoint areas, contours of 300 feet, in and around the northern parts of “AA” county. The motivation to visit four areas wasn’t there, but since other visitors have fairly decisively shown that this one area is the county highpoint with a near certainty of probability, the “return on investment” of taking the time to make the visit was now in our favor.

We were on our (usually) annual visit to Beth’s folks in Virginia, this time set for May instead of August to avoid the crushing humidity we usually encounter when we visit. We flew into BWI and smack into some heavy storms. Since we arrived kind of late in the day, we opted to stay in a hotel near the airport rather than add 120 miles of driving to her folks’ place all on the same day. We had plans for other easy county highpoints nearby so the Anne Arundel highpoint was relegated to the end of the line: we figured it would be easier to get it on the drive back to BWI on our last day. Ironically, our hotel was just two or three miles up the road. We could have visited this between errands. However, it was “Lost” night on TV. Highpointing was not our priority tonight.

So fast forward 11 days and here we are again, weather nice, driving back into Baltimore toward the airport. It’s been a good trip, a successful and happy visit with her folks and time in Lexington with rainy and nice days alternating. Off of Interstate-70 we took our “short-cut” to BWI: South on US-29 to MD-100 which leads into Glen Burnie. This avoids the Loop-695 mess and the warren of highways in that area that are notoriously difficult to manage for non-natives like us. From MD-100 we merged onto MD-295 to MD-175 and found ourselves forced to go west into Jessup… so we made a quasi-legal u-turn to get on the proper bearing. Immediately southeast of the 295-175 intersection is Clark Road on our left, then tiny Fields Road to our right.

I decided to park early, and Beth decided to not bother at all, as these dinky highpoints don’t interest her (I wonder why). I walked Fields Road towards its high spot then up a berm onto the front lawn of the property that contains the highpoint, which appears to be at or near a big oak. I kept my visit very short. And that was that. Back to the car, we went on our way to the airport and back home to 108-degree May weather.

This trip added a total of five new Maryland counties to my totals. I now have twelve Maryland counties out of 22. Is it possible I might complete the state? I just may try over the coming years. The real difficult ones are south of Baltimore, in the low-lying “neck” areas where dozens of possibilities exist for each county. We’ll see.