There’s a landmark here called Short Mountain. It dominates the landscape all the way to Nashville, an isolated remnant of the Cumberland Plateau. You can’t miss it, especially at night as several cell towers flash along its summit.
Been hiking there for years. At the very top there’s a series of rock bluffs and large boulders. It’s a dramatic setting but s short and easy hike along a well worn trail. The rock is sandstone with breaks of deposits of ocean-rounded stones you’ll find some days at the shore. How many millions of years since they tossed in the surf?
Around one turn there’s a long rock shelter still a popular campsite. I’ve found arrowheads there over the years, and there’s an emblem pecked into the wall identifying two men who mined millstones from the bluff in 1806. How they got them off the mountain is a mystery to me.
A few years ago, on one of our hikes there, we came across what appeared to be an ancient pictograph of the form of a man scratched into the rocks. It was worn away, the entire summit is a kind of sandstone, and covered with a pale green mold. Still it looked to me like it could be centuries old. Some fool has scratched over it with a newer, cruder stick figure, defacing what could have been the genuine article. Lost.
At any rate, we all took the grandkids on the hike through the bluffs, taking pictures in the very settings where I took pictures of my kids 20-25 years ago. The same rocks were there, nothing had changed. To their tiny eyes it must have seemed we were hiking among mountains as they scrambled to climb to the top of the same rocks which once challenged their father and uncles, when they were that small.
Over the years there’s been talk of making the place a state park. It should be, or at least a natural area for everyone to enjoy. There’s no trespassing signs along the road, but we were assured by a group of horseback riders riding the trail it was OK to hike as long as we didn’t get over on the property of the Bible camp which claims one side of the mountain. Still, it's a pocket of Tennessee's native beauty which should be open and inviting to all.
