Lookout Mountain

Clearing storm over Lookout Mountain

Canon EOS A2, 80-200 f2.8L "Magic Drainpipe" lens, Fujichrome 100 film

(Click to enlarge)

 

Lookout is not a spectacular mountain. Folks out west would probably laugh at the notion of calling it a mountain at all. In fact, were it not the home of Rock City Gardens (“See Rock City atop Lookout Mountain”), probably only the local people would know about it. 

 A southern extension of the Cumberland Plateau, Lookout Mountain is less than 2400 feet at its highest point. If you were to look at it from above you would see that it looks like an alligator with its jaws open. The tip of its nose is in Tennessee and its body sprawls southwest for 80 miles across the northwest corner of Georgia and into Alabama, where its tail tapers out at Noccalula Falls in Gadsden. Its top is a rolling tableland maybe ten or twelve miles wide in some places, but mostly narrower than that. 

As I said, Lookout is not spectacular. But I grew up in Indiana, where we have no mountains at all, so when I came south to college it seemed like a sure enough real mountain to me. 

Lookout was the first mountain I got to know. I drove its backroads (mostly dirt in those days), roamed its canyons, waterfalls, and swimming holes, kissed girls there, and even wrote poems about it (about the mountain, that is, not about kissing the girls). When I moved away, Lookout kept drawing me back. For 33 years I lived in its shadow, in a valley between Lookout and its extension, Pigeon Mountain (the “lower jaw of the alligator” in the aerial view). From the back windows of my house I could watch the sun rise over Pigeon, and from the front windows I could see it set over Lookout. 

I no longer live in that valley called McLemore Cove, but my lifelong love affair with Lookout Mountain continues. In all seasons and in all its moods, Lookout has symbolized for me God’s beauty, peace, strength, and eternity. 

 (Adapted from my limited edition book Georgia: A Backroads Portrait.)

(Photograph copyright David B. Jenkins 2020)

Soli Gloria Deo

To the glory of God alone

Tags: Photography, Lookout Mountain, Rock City Gardens, Cumberland Plateau, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Noccalula Falls, Gadsden, Pigeon Mountain, McLemore Cove, Canon EOS A2, Fujichrome film, Canon 80-200 f2.8L lens, Magic Drainpipe