12/19/2011
Aren’t all mountains stone? Never mind. This particular mountain is an 825-foot high chunk of granite only 5-miles at its base. Apparently this odd protuberance has been a tourist stop-off since the 1820s. Today, a whole industry has built around it and now the mountain is surrounded by an amusement park with your typical amusement park jazz.
We had no interest in the park – we just wanted to see the mountain. Well, I wanted to. Laura couldn’t have cared less. We still had to pay $10 for the pleasure in an architecturally devious parking lot designed in such a way that you can’t see a colossal mountain without parking there.
The side of the mountain is scarred by the largest bas-relief sculpture in the world. It shows Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson riding forever into battle. It was designed by the Mount Rushmore guy in his younger days.
In the 1910s the Ku Klux Klan was revived beneath this mountain. Now people ride inner tubes down tracks of artificial snow. The South is complicated.
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