The Skyuka Arch

Almost twenty years ago, I read about a small but mythical arch on the side of Lookout Mountain. Russ Manning, in his 1992 book The Historic Cumberland Plateau: An Explorer's Guide, described it as "unique, possibly the only such arch in the world." Following Mr. Manning's description, Terry Hamrick and I located the tiny arch and I took a photograph.

Now, decades later, I had forgotten exactly where the arch might be but I did remember this about it: aside from the location, almost everything else Russ Manning had said about the Skyuka Arch was wrong!

I wanted to take another look just be sure that Russ Manning, who I don't know personally but would normally consider a reliable source, wasn't completely off his rocker when it came to arches on Lookout Mountain. So today Brady and I parked the truck at the Skyuka trailhead at the Highway 318/Alford Hill intersection. Walking up the highway a short distance to a wooden barrier that read "no parking" (still exactly as described by Manning), we could see it from the road. The Skyuka Arch beckoned! As arches goes, this one was just an infant: about five feet tall, two feet tall, and two feet long. As Manning says, the arch is really nothing more than a short section of solution passage exposed to the elements.

Beyond that it gets weird. "The arch-shaped rock is sandstone," Manning writes, "while the surrounding rock is siltstone. The most likely explanation is that the arch originated atop the mountain, perhaps as the opening to a cave or spring, but then fell, coming to rest in its present location, forming an arch."

Whoops! I'm no geologist but I do know that the arch and most of the rocks in immediate area are all part of the same outcropping of limestone, not sandstone nor siltstone, and that particular bit of rock is completely at home at its current elevation. There are plenty of sandstone boulders in the area that came from the top of the mountain, but the Skyuka Arch is not among them.

That said, I salute Mr. Manning for bringing the world's attention to a small rock feature that otherwise would probably have gone unnoticed. The Skyuka Trailhead is actually quite a fascinating place, arch and all. The trailhead marks the point at which the Old Federal Road starts up the mountain. The area has huge boulders, massive sinkholes, English Ivy growing on a Kudzu scale, red barrels, mysterious holes, and even a secret hideout under a large rock that Brady and I discovered only this evening.

A secret hideout, you ask? Where? We could see it from the Arch, and that, my friend, is just another reason to visit that most infamous of the arches of Lookout Mountain.