Lookout! singing in crystal canyons is singing in cathedrals

Lookout Mountain again: Cloudland Canyon – there are caverns beneath with lakes!

Cloudland, near Chattanooga yet in Georgia, is really the gem of Lookout Mountain, so beautiful I keep coming back every time I'm nearby. This time, we descended to the second falls then again to a third one deep into the canyon, and by this time we were singing and drumming the rails on the way down! Each waterfall has its own personality: The first, our gulf golden-child that gets the attention it deserves;

the second one tall, distant, secretive – doesn't realize its own beauty!

The third (and last, as far as we know) forgotten, smaller, dark, and deep. Yet totally cool.
And then there are would-have been falls in between, where instead of water cascading down the surface, it drips deep inside the rock, you can see it if you're careful to look.

A Turn to Tennessee, A Fiery Gizzard in the Rain

Imagine being the first autumn leaf at the bottom of these falls.












ttttennesssseee parks I visited last weekend, for the second time - Red Clay Council Ground in April was the first, the last gathering place for the Cherokee before the Trail of Tears was begun - and it was raining but that didn't stop me. I was standing in North Chickamauga River in a gorge with fog covering the peaks above and the water was warm.











Faith is a flat-iron in the valley rain. Hope is a blow dryer. Loneliness is a soggy daisy in Soddy-Daisy. And contentment is this spider on its riverside rock.








After this I was led up Monteagle Mountain, the truckers' favorite hill to hate, and at the top a mountain man suggested this white-dressed witchy woman wander to Grundy Forest and the Fiery Gizzard. One of the South Cumberland Plateau State Parks between Chattanooga and Nashville, on Scenic Hwy 41, it was like a mist tent going down the trail to the creek but I wasn't the only one out here in the rain.











Some waterfalls.....
Dog Hole (or Blue Hole)
















School Run























Foster Falls




and thennn....