Blue Ridge Country March/April 2022 - 46

the compass. The mountaintop may be
reached by automobile, with the last
quarter-mile of the road being dirt and
gravel.
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The Cranny Crow
overlook in West
Virginia's Lost River
State Park is two miles
up to look down at
the valley 1,000 feet
below.
LEFT: The expanse
and beauty of North
Georgia's Gibbs
Gardens make for a
great sidetrip from the
fine viewing decks on
Mount Oglethorpe.
Laurie and I started our exploration a
little after sunrise. Basically in the middle
of the parking lot, the Northern Viewing
Deck overlooks the wooded ridgelines of
the north Georgia mountains. Following
the circular, easy, half-mile Eagle's
Rest Trail in a clockwise direction, the
wide panorama to the east overlooks
the Big Canoe residential community
with its two constructed lakes taking up
much of the valley below. The Southern
Viewing Deck looks out upon the flatter
landscape of the Georgia piedmont.
(Someone on Yelp said they were able
to see Atlanta's skyline 60 miles away,
but things were a bit too hazy for me
to verify that it's possible to do so.) The
scene from the Western Viewing Deck is
a woodlands landscape of lush deciduous
trees.
Wanting to spend more time here, we
fter more than a year of pretty
much staying in the house and
venturing forth to walk just
some local pathways, Laurie
and I were fully vaccinated and
ready for some traveling and
far-off vistas. We knew that, of
course, so were a multitude of people.
We came up with a plan to seek out
some of the region's best viewpoints,
but not those-such as Hawksbill in Virginia's
Shenandoah National Park-that
we knew would probably be overrun. We
decided on the lesser-celebrated, but still
wonderful vistas that are more lightly
visited. Knowing that our hiking prowess
had deteriorated somewhat during the
past year, we chose sites that could easily
be reached within the morning hours.
Not only did this hold the promise of
meeting fewer people, it meant we would
have an easier outing and could be done
before the true heat of day had built up.
There would also still be enough daylight
hours to possibly visit some nearby attractions.
A
Our
June pilgrimage is fully translatable
into early spring or fall-color visits.
46 BLUERIDGECOUNTRY.COM
GEORGIA
Mount Oglethorpe was the original
southern terminus of the Appalachian
Trail until 1958, when trail advocates
considered the increasing development
on and around the mountain to be incompatible
with the pathway's wilderness
character.
After the trail's southern starting
point was moved more than 10 miles
to the northeast on Springer Mountain,
Oglethorpe's summit seems to have been
pretty much forgotten and neglected. So
much so that the monument to Edward
Oglethorpe, who founded the Georgia
colony, became so vandalized that it was
moved to the nearby town of Jasper to
prevent any further damage.
Ken and Billie Ann Rice purchased
more than 100 acres on Oglethorpe's
summit in 1995, and, under the auspices
of the Mount Oglethorpe Foundation,
opened the Eagle's Rest Park to the public
in 2014. Workers with the Mountain
Stewards, a nonprofit organization, built
a system of trails and observation platforms
looking out to the four points of
walked the Grassy Knob Vista Trail-no
vista, despite the name-which winds
for 1.3 miles in the woods just below the
summit before driving to Gibbs Gardens
in nearby Ball Ground, Georgia.
The 300-plus acres of the gardens
make them one of the country's largest
residential estate gardens. Miles of trails
wind through dozens of eye-pleasingly
arranged areas of hydrangeas, daffodils,
azaleas, rhododendrons, roses, daylilies
and more. Small ponds have been created
to reflect the beauty of the Japanese
and waterlily gardens. And who knew
that, after having had such a visual feast
for several hours in the gardens, the little
Arbor Café's chicken salad sandwich and
organic iced lemonade would please our
taste buds so well?
TENNESSEE
When I asked Johnny Molloy, author of
" Five Star Trails: Tri-Cities of Tennessee
and Virginia: Your Guide to the Area's
Most Beautiful Hikes In and Around Bristol,
Johnson City and Kingsport, " for his
choice of viewpoints, he directed me to a
hike near his home in Johnson City.
" The White Rock vista atop Buffalo
Mountain provides a first-rate panorama
of Cherokee National Forest high coun
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Blue Ridge Country March/April 2022

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