Indiana: Miles and Miles of Trees and traffic

So many miles of trees along the Indiana highway. Ronald Reagan would not have enjoyed driving through it.

I drove through Indiana on July 15, 2026 on my way Ontario, Canada. Just an ordinary day in summer. On an ordinary interstate.

This is what it looked like from the highway:

The West is wide open from the interstate. You can see for miles, sometimes it seems like hundreds of miles.

Indiana is not the west. Indiana is part of what I call American tree-land. There are so many trees lining the interstate that sometimes you simply cannot see anything but trees. There is no sense of perspective, other than the sense that the state has lots of trees.

Which it does. About 4.9 million acres of forest. Indiana’s miles of trees are pretty damn impressive, I’d say.

Ronald Reagan once said this about trees: “I mean, if you’ve looked at a hundred thousand acres or so of trees — you know, a tree is a tree, how many more do you need to look at?”

Ronald Reagan would not have enjoyed driving through much of the United States of America.

The other impressive thing about Indiana, besides its tree-lined vistas, was a traffic jam I witnessed there.

Indiana Traffic Jam: So many Miles of stopped vehicles

It may have been the longest traffic jam I have ever seen in my life.

I’ve seen some very impressive traffic jams, but this one dropped my jaw. I cannot accurately claim that it stretched the entire width of the state. It might have though.

You know those wide open views from the roads of the West, the ones that seem to go on for hundreds of miles? That’s what this traffic jam was like.

Trucks and cars backed up (in the other direction thank God!) for miles and miles and miles on the Indiana interstate. And then more miles and miles and miles and miles. And then more miles and miles. Etc.

I did not see anything to warrant this stretch of motionlessness. There was summer road construction of course. There was road construction everywhere I went on my road trip.

July was peak road construction time in Indiana. If that’s what peak road construction normally looks like in Indiana, I tip my hat.

Indiana is strictly mediocre in terms of traffic, hovering around mid-range for the various states. But if a mid-range state can come up with a traffic jam that seems to last 50 miles, that state has some real competitive fire. Just ask the Hoosiers.

Mysteriously, the traffic jam was gone by the time I reached Michigan.