Skyuka Spring

Yesterday I escaped from the holidays for a couple of hours to visit Reflection Riding, the Lower Truck Trail, and Skyuka Spring. I had hiked to the spring with Mark Wolinsky two or three years ago via the Skyuka Trail, but had not been on the Lower Truck Road for a decade or more. Long ago our gang of mountain bikers would ride that road (one of the very few trails in the park that are open to bicycles) regularly. I had measured distances for the trail guide, driven trucks out to the spring with Dennis Curry on various occasions, been shown old homesites and mysterious walls that have faded into the fog of my memory as they have back into the woods that now surround them.

There was still some snow on the ground from the White Christmas of 2010 as I rode past the gazebo and pond that mark the southern boundary of Reflection Riding. The sky was blue and the creek was a deep green. And as always the spring was flowing, gurgling, gently gushing. Legend has it had gold was buried here somewhere, and that made me want to ask Dennis if anyone had ever tried to dive the tiny space beneath the rocks. There is a hole in the rocks above but no air was moving through even on this winter day, an almost certain sign that solid dirt and rock plugs any passage.

I walked uphill on the Skyuka Trail to examine an old stone wall and to look for the foundations of a house that once stood here. Two decades ago William Raul gave me the name of someone I could call who he said had delivered groceries here as a boy...but of course I never got around to calling, and now it is certainly too late. Alas, no air coming through that passage now, but even still I probably find out names, dates, perhaps even maps if I knew who to ask and where to look. But for now there were just rocks and some bits of metal marking what was once a house, questions waiting to be answered.

I got back and my bike and pedaled a mile or so to the top of the hill where I stopped because I thought it looked like a proper spot for a homesite. Sure enough there just a few yards in the woods was a line of stones, clearly manmade. Later, reading my own hiking guide, I would find this very spot mentioned as an old homesite, meaning that as so often happens lately that I was merely rediscovering things I once had known, but today I found a little more that I hadn't seen previously. Uphill from the rocks was a enclosed stone corral roughly three feet high, possibly a "cold house" or some sort of storage, but what? Built for what purpose, and how long ago?

After I rode back out to the truck parked at the Reflection Riding Gates I went for a run on the property, hoping to prove that I could still hoof it around the loop as fast as I had in my prime. No such luck!

P.S. (if there is such a thing in a blog)

I had carried a camera and later produced this video of my ride on a new "Hike Lookout" Channel on YouTube.

Riding the Truck Trail

Last Wednesday Brady and I parked at the bottom of the Guild Trail on Ochs Highway and pedaled off up the trail on our truly ancient mountain bikes. There are almost always vehicles in this parking lot and by the time we were leaving, it was just about full. Everybody was out enjoying an absolute perfect November day with blue skies, colorful leaves, and temps in the low 70's.

Back in the old days we would park every Wednesday at the upper Ruby Falls lot near the Eagles Nest and ride the truck trail. Terry Hamrick, Mark Wolinsky, Otis Farmer, and later Jerry Patten and I would race back the 5 miles or so to the end of the truck road, then pedal out. Decades later, Brady and I had the same plan, but being older and wiser we were starting even further down the mountain to make the trip more challenging.

we needn't have bothered. The roadbed is much rougher than it used to be, the hills somehow steeper. I was on Annie's old mountain bike, and every bump threatened to bring me to a complete stop. Still, Brady and I set a new record of 1:46 round trip (a record mostly because we'd never done this particular route before). It was dark by the time we got back to the truck, so good thing we weren't even slower. Still, there were people out biking, walking, and running the trail even in the darkness. It's fantastic to live in such an active outdoor town, a place where treasures such as Lookout Mountain have been preserved and protected for the use of all.

Cummings Bottom

Brady had texted that he wanted to visit the Natural Bridge so after picking him up I headed for Lookout. Actually, he had meant the natural bridge in Prentice Cooper, but didn't protest too much so on we went.

On the way up Scenic Highway I couldn't resist pulling over at the curve near the Sky Harbor Inn for a quick look at the old roadbed just downhill of the guardrail. According to the timeline I made back in the early 1990s when I knew this kind of stuff, Kelly's Ferry Road (later known as Old Wauhatchie Pike) was "apparently" built in the 1820's over the north shoulder of the mountain. This is the road that is visible in the huge James Walker painting "The Battle of Lookout Mountain" that hangs in the Point Park visitor center. For about a hundred years, until the "new" Wauhatchie Pike (now Cummings Highway) was built in 1912, this was a main route into Chattanooga from the west. The eastern section of road past Sky Harbor is preserved as a greenway (and in fact was still open as a public road when I moved to Chattanooga in 1988) but the section on the northwest side is all but forgotten. Today the old road is simply a surprisingly wide and level swatch of ground in the woods that makes a gracious curve and descends to Cummings Highway at the old Lookout Mountain Tourist Lodge. At that point the modern Cummings Highway obliterates the roadbed.

Curious, we climbed back up to the truck and drove down to check out the old quarry on Cummings Highway. Surprisingly, we did not climb down into the hole itself, something I've never done. There was some trash, but not as much as I expected. It seems that the old quarry, like the old road, is largely forgotten.

Onward, to the Natural Bridge! But first we drove through some of the spacious trailer park across the highway from the Tourist Lodge. it's not a fancy place by any means, but as trailer parks go it is almost scenic, perched on the lower slopes as it is. Noting a favorable position of the sun, we decided to drive over and have a look at Cummings Bottom, where I hoped to climb the hills and get a view that would match that of the Walker painting, and maybe even a photograph or two. The first gate was open, so we drove into the New York monument adjacent to the Interstate and parked. A Park Service sign said "authorized vehicles only," so after examining the monument we continued on foot. The first surprise was an old homesite not far down the gravel path. I am always fascinated by these places. Who lived there? How long ago? Why did they leave? I found some small pieces of broken china near a hole that had been carefully covered up. What was down in that hole? I didn't have a light and so may never know.

We hiked the wide green path of a powerline up the hillside and found a second, abandoned and stripped New York monument. The metal plaques explaining the monuments purpose had been removed (stolen, we guessed). There was no real trail leading to the monument; it simply sat there, lonely and stoic (as monuments tend to be) at the edge of the woods and the power line atop a deserted hill.

Back at the truck, we decided that we really needed to visit the graveyard at the end of the gravel road. I had walked to this site a few years ago, but we were tired and running low on time. Fortunately, Brady had a legal theory which stated that access to graveyards must be provided by law and thus we were authorized to drive the road if the graveyard was our destination. In we went, driving about a half mile through a short tunnel beneath the railroad, past Lookout Creek, arriving at the graveyard only to see we were not alone: three or more wild turkeys were visiting as well.

It was about 6:00 PM by the time we headed back up Lookout for the Natural Bridge, which is on top of the mountain near the "triangle intersection." The parking lot, which had been tiny years ago, was now quite large, and what had been an indistinct path through the woods was now a marked thoroughfare. Indeed, citizens had cleared the entire area (the Natural Bridge Park seems to be about five acres or so) or all underbrush so it was all open space. Walking paths, bridges across the stream, and picnic tables were strategically placed. In a way, it was a shame to have lost some of the mystery of the place by making all the surrounding homes so visible, but on the plus side I could see a lot more of the natural features, too. And yes, the bridge was still there, another stoic monument to be photographed and studied.

It was getting late and we were both tired now. I had thought the Natural Bridge would be a quick and easy thing for us old geezers to tackle, but perhaps we are even older and more feeble than I knew.

Photos to come!

Memory Place

It was a whithered, sinewy, very old tree, unusual because it stood naked and defiant long after most trees would have toppled, no more than forty feet high but a good two feet across, trunk and branches intact. A tremendous cedar, I wondered? But what caught my eye were the axe marks about two feet up. I was a hundred yards above the Guild Trail on the very northern nose of Lookout Mountain. Probably two dozen people a day passed nearby on the trail, but virtually no human beings ever come up the steep slope I was on. Who had started to cut down this tree, then thought better of it? How long ago?

This is the conundrum of Lookout Mountain: nearly every inch of soil has been walked upon and often manipulated by men going back over centuries, and discerning the work of neighborhood kids from civil war soldiers is not easy for the casual observer. A half mile from this very spot, archaeologists had argued whether a collection of walls and "rifle pits" were made by the Confederacy or prehistoric Indians (the last word seems to be the Confederacy).

Brady and I had parked at the rear of the upper Ruby Falls lot and started our walk at the Eagles Nest, the old quarry that had been turned from an eyesore into one of the centerpieces of Adolph Och's vision of the Hanging Gardens of Lookout only to fall back into ghostly neglect in modern times. The two concrete eagles, created by Spefano Giuliano in 1931, still stand on the upper corners of the quarry walls (although one of them is completely headless and the other is not much better off); stairs still lead up from Scenic Highway. We poked around what used to be a pool with a fountain in the center of the quarry, examined an old stone wall that probably once held back the soil for the variety of exotic plants that were brought in.



Just to the north were the ruins of a pedestal that once held a bust of Shakespeare, the first (and last, from what I can tell) of a series of statues intended to inspire visitors to this place. There is no pedestal there now, only a careless jumble of rocks. The bard departed this place long ago.

Winding up through the woods we climbed over the Hardy Trail (once of the bed of a railroad up the mountain) and into the woods on the other side. A hundred feet from the trail we found the Old Federal (aka Andrew Jackson) Road, which dates back to 1805 and may have been the first wagon trail through the Cherokee nation. In those days the Tennessee river forced travelers up onto the side of Lookout to get past Moccasin Bend on a relatively flat bench of land between bluffs and rocky slopes above and below. Two hundred years later that once major thoroughfare is just a faint impression through the woods, forgotten and reclaimed by nature. We followed the old path around the nose, over a cleared powerline, and down to the point that it crossed the old railroad bed heading steeply down the mountain.

Not long after pondering the axed tree, I saw what I thought was at least a dozen white-tail deer. It turned out to be just five, but that was enough for me. I had seen deer on the more isolated western slopes but never this far north.

We walked back on the Federal Road until it dumped us back into the Ruby Falls parking lot just a few feet from the truck.

Return to John Wilson Park

Another cold February afternoon found Brady and I back on the slopes of Lookout. We parked at the bottom of the old driveway off Cummings Highway that once led to the Adult Scenic Motel, and walked up the drive to explore some of the old home sites on the hillside sandwiched between the busy modern highway and the much older, now closed Old Wauhatchie Pike just above.

Returning to the truck, we started up the marked trail that winds up to the Wauhatchie Pike Greenway, which we found in bad need of maintenance. At one point the trail was so overgrown that I lost the way. We had walked right by this trail on the Greenway just a couple of weeks before and never seen it, and wouldn't have seen it this time if we hadn't come up it first. Of course, this is just the kind of trail that Brady and I like to hike, feeling our way along as if we are retracing the faded footsteps of history. This would be an easy trail to repair since it is so close to the road; a few hours with the clippers and shovels, some timber for steps and waterbars, and this trail would be a thing of beauty and convenience.

We noted that someone had been bulldozing back the English Ivy at the start of the Greenway to expose two drains--probably a good idea since this area had been flooded last time we visited. There is an old ivy-covered road at this point that climbs diagonally up the northern trestle on the Guild Trail. But my attention was captured by the sight of heavy equipment and piles of gravel up on the old Cravens Road, just to the south. We'd seen a lot of survey stakes up there three weeks ago, and now it looked a major construction project! Since the old Cravens Road up from Wauhatchie Pike was part of the Federal Road, dating back to 1805, I wasn't happy to see it disturbed. (After looking at my map collection last week I realized that if I ever had any doubt about whether this was the Federal (aka Jackson) Road, I was mistaken. At least three different maps showed this was definitely the route: up from Old Wauhatchie, under the northern trestle, then across the slope towards Ruby Falls.)


Up we went, toward an idling truck at the top of the hill. Inside was a friendly fellow who told us he was guarding the equipment for the pipleline company, and all the brouhaha was not construction but simply maintenance on the pipeline. They had laid gravel up the old roadbed to the trestle, and scraped clean some of the adjoining roads, but it appeared no lasting harm would be done. The man was friendly but said he was trying not to fall asleep since other guards had been robbed recently (fortunately, not at this particular location). He made sure we saw the gun on his front seat, but agreed that it was fine with him if we continued looking around the area.



So for the first time in my 22 years of tromping around Lookout I took the paved road to the left and marveled at a long stretch of concrete where something (maybe just a house with a big parking area) had been once. The entire slope of the mountain from here over to the Incline #1 above Chattam had long ago been filled with houses built on terraces. We followed the road along a stone wall visible under the browned kudzu for a hundred yards, trying to imagine it. The first big gully was a whopper, a big swag of ground cleared by the power of kudzu. There were more walls above, but the main road continued down the gully and then back up the other side (connecting with another overgrown road up from a house on Wauhatchie), eventually emerging in another kudzu-filled gully above Church Street and Chattam, the site of Incline #1. If the road Brady and I had explored above the Guild trail near the Incline two weeks ago predated the 1886 railroad bed, then this was almost surely the lower portion of that route. Parts of it still showed old pavement. I stood just below the northern end of the trestle in a spot old photographs from around the 1890s showed a house perched on the hillside; this road would have been its driveway.


Brady and I had gotten separated but both of us were carrying the one essential of modern hiking (the cell phone) so we were soon reunited back at the idling truck of the pipeline guard, who sure enough had fallen asleep. Near the intersection of Cravens and Wauhatchie Pike I noticed what looked like an old millstone that had apparently been used as a yard decoration for a house now long gone. We walked back through John Wilson Park, amazed as always at the juxtaposition of history and nature that seems so inescapable on Lookout Mountain.

More Old Roads and Memories

Brady had already put in a few miles on foot when I picked him up today, so he was pleased when I suggested we do an easy hike up the Guild Trail. It doesn't get any easier than walking up the gentle grade of an old railroad bed.

A half mile up the trail from the parking lot on Ochs Highway in St. Elmo, we came to "the big trestle," 220 feet long and 35 feet high. Lots of history here! Looking down at the gully full of brown kudzu, we could see the Chattam plant below, along with the old Zion church that's being renovated into (this is just my guess) a posh private residence. A raised hump down the gully marked the path of the original Incline railway, opened in 1887. Uphill, on the right side of the gully, was an old road that sucked Brady right off the graveled trail into the woods. According to the trusty trail guide, "this old road, probably constructed by land speculators around the turn of the century, leads about a half mile uphill to connect with Lower Cravens Terrace Road near Scenic Highway." Jeepers, the author sounded pretty sure about that theory. I think I based the idea on the fact that the road seemed to pass over the top of the broad gauge railroad (circa 1886), indicating that it was built later, but who knows at this point. In fact, I began to wonder if the road wasn't there simply to help with the construction and maintenance of the incline.

We followed the road up the hill and indeed it seemed to cross directly over the bed of the old incline, which unlike below was very distinct, a flat broad path bulldozing straight up the hill. I was photographing the incline when Brady yelled that he was on an old road leading off to the north. We followed this path to an intersection with Lower Cravens Terrace, just as the trusty trail guide had described. Maybe that guy did know what he was talking about, after all.

Brady was expressing a desire to walk on pavement, but I knew there were more old roads in the vicinity, so we continued downhill and to the north towards the bottom end of Lower Cravens Terrace. There was an old road, all right, a paved one (underneath the leaves). There's your pavement, I told Brady. Lower Cravens Terrace was in the past a rather "unique" neighborhood, and we found traces of this such as a city street lamp that had been attached to a tree instead of a pole. The road actually led downhill to the last house on Lower Cravens, lined on each side by wood waiting to be split, a hundred yards of wood, a lifetime supply for any wood stove. Just downhill from this area was our friend the Guild trail and the other trestle, not far from the Ruby Falls parking lot. This trestle is also very historical, for according to the trail guide, the remains of a road passing beneath are likely one build by Robert Cravens in the 1850's and the Old Federal Road, which dates back to 1805. We'd seen signs of surveying, mostly just flagging tape, all along the Guild Trail, but here the signs became particularly evident. Apparently the property lines correspond to some of the old roads. I found numerous stakes that read "N Row Cravens" and "S Row Jo Conn Guild" and the like.

The Cravens Road (and, I think, the Federal Road) passed underneath the trestle and then straight downhill a couple of hundred yards to Old Wauhatchie Pike, not far the barrier that marks the southern end of the Greenway. In fact, Brady and I had been down there just a couple of weeks before and had wondered about another old road, completely covered in English Ivy, that comes up to the area of that very same trestle. At one time the lower slope was a complete neighborhood covered with with homes and roads, now all covered with vines and leaves.

It wasn't until I got home and pulled out the trail guide again that I discovered that between the two trestles is another old road crossing the railbed. Says the trailbook: "Uphill, this road leads to the lower end of lower Cravens Terrace Road; below, it leads to Cravens Road off Old Wauhatchie Pike. This may be an alternate route constructed by Robert Cravens up the mountain to his home."

Sounds like Brady and I need to go back another time when we have more energy (but before the poison ivy covers the woods) and take another look!

Mountain Beautiful Loop

I didn't have my camera but Brady was looking for some exercise so we parked at the Cravens House and headed up the Cravens Trail for our regular Wednesday night hike. It was a beautiful day and it wasn't long until a huge rock uphill of the trail caught our attention, so we veered off up through the trees to climb it. Once on the summit it didn't make sense to lose all that altitude, so we continued straight up the hill to the Bluff Trail above.

Brady claimed that he had never hiked the Mountain Beautiful Trail, so off we went--right into a barricade across the start of the trail near the old Point Hotel. It seemed obvious that the trail was closed, but as an official VIP (Volunteer in the Park) who maintained this very trail 15 years ago, I figured it was my obligation to investigate...so on we hiked. The trail follows the eastern bluff below Point Park, then begins a descent to cross underneath the Incline (it would be a very intimate experience if one of the Incline cars happens to pass overhead while you are under there). Then the trail switchbacks and climbs back up to the base of the bluffs for almost another mile.

Then it happened: we came upon the reason for the trail closure. At a particularly large gully (mile 0.89 according to my trusty trail guide) we found a stacked pile of bags of cement, lumber, jackhammers, and air hoses running up the bluff. Evidently workers were clearing away all the loose rock and preparing to build what I hope is not a concrete monstrosity of a bridge. The trail was built to high standards by the CCC in the 1930s and deserves to be kept in that kind of high-quality but natural condition. That said, I was pleased to see that this trail, neglected for so long, was getting some attention at last.

Past this point I was puzzled because the trail seemed oddly disturbed and trampled. What was going on? We started to hit muddy patches, and the reason became obvious--hoofprints, postholing the trail! The contractors are using mules to ferry in the concrete and other supplies. I'll bet there hasn't been a mule on the trail since Harriet Whiteside stopped using one to pump the water up from Leonora Spring back in the 1800's. A clever strategy indeed, although someone may later have to repair the damage to the rest of the trail done by repairing that one gully. (I later learned that the purpose of the work was sewer work, not trail work, which makes more sense.)

Just before reaching the end of the trail, past Leonora and Ragon springs, I attempted to find the now quite elusive Alum spring between Scenic Highway and the bluff above. My trail guide describes a "faint trail" leading to the spring from the upper switchback but all traces of that trail were gone today. The guide says it is 100 yards to the spring but it may be further; it was getting dark so I turned back without reaching the spring.

Brady and I walked down the Hardy trail (the wide and graveled remains of the Broad Gauge railroad bed) for a mile back to the Cravens House, pleasantly tired from our small adventure.