Hiking the Point Hotel Railroad Loop

Brady and I spent four hours today making a loop on the northern end of the mountain, most of it off the maintained trails. We parked at the Cravens House and were about to start up the Incline #1 (East Cravens) trail but veered off through the backyard of the old Hardy home to see if we could find any more traces of the mysterious roadbed we'd found a couple of days earlier just above the old railroad bed. Sure enough, we followed the "flat ground" and found stacked rocks lining the downhill side indicating this was more than likely an old road. We think it's a very old one because it seems to go under the Incline #1, which was built in the late 1800's.

We charged directly uphill to the Incline #1 trail, then spent a few minutes photographing the truly massive stonework just past the "90 degree" turn in the old railway. We approached from the bottom because true to our nature we were off the official trail and following the old CCC switchback (when I reopened this trail in the early 1990s I did not follow this route because it was completely washed away at the top, instead following the bed of the incline itself for 75 yards to reach the same spot). The stonework where the trail first meets the incline is long and impressive, but the upper wall is even larger. Here the incline went across a high trestle over a gully, affording a view that must have left some memories on its passengers.

We searched for a piece of the incline cable that I had found 15 years ago (it was right there on the ground on the old railbed) but didn't find it. However, we did come across a very large bolt at the Point Hotel site that I had never noticed before.

From the hotel we continued southward down the bluff trail, which is built on the bed of a narrow gauge railroad. We could hear the a train whistle in Lookout Valley below--very appropriate. After a quarter mile the footpath drops down while the original railway continued on trestles.

Today the trestles are gone, but sewer paths suspended in the air on not-so-sturdy timbers mark the route. The old railway goes very close to the back yards of some posh bluff homes, so we tried to be inconspicuous. Behind

what my notes say are the old Nottingham place, we came to a swinging bridge over the tracks. I remembered steps coming down from above and a place for someone to wait for the train (later a trolley) but despite the fact that it was winter and bitter cold, the entire area was overgrown with greenery. Although the bridge was broken, we could still clamber to the top of the rock for a great view.

The old railroad was getting ever more overgrown and ever close to the houses, so after

photographing a set of trestle bases, we started looking for an escape route. These trestles must have been something, by the way, because the actual tracks were about twenty feet higher than the stonework--lots of timbers, just like in the movies. At any rate, the slopes were steep and we were now about a hundred feet above the Bluff trail, and the trail was living up to its name. For a time we thought we might have to traverse all the way to Sunset Rock, but eventually we found a gully we could climb down.

The sun was setting so there was no time to investigate the "mystery cave" in this area--we needed to boggie on home. At the intersection of the Cravens Trail we noted with a mix of amusement and consternation two adjacent signs that said that Sunset Rock was either one mile or half a mile away. These signs are within ten feet of one another!

Once back below the Point we followed an old trail directly down the nose of the mountain to the Cravens House. This trail is marked on a 1921 map and makes a beeline down the hill, switching back shortly to emerge at the cluster of monuments on the hill behind the Cravens House. Darkness was upon us but we had completed our loop!