Cherokee Trail

Everyone knows the trail to the top of Stone Mountain. It is good exercise, but there is only so much you can see from up there. I prefer the Cherokee Trail, the one that goes all the way around the mountain: babbling brooks, streams that rush down the steep hillsides after rain, lake views and the mountain from every side. All the wildlife is down here too.

It is longer than going up and back down, but there is far more going on. You don’t have to walk the whole loop, either. There is parking almost everywhere around the mountain, so you can park at any lot and walk a piece of it in and out.

For this review I walked the whole loop on the white blazes, starting from the covered bridge at Indian Island. Most of my sunrise mornings walk part of it, but they wander onto the island, the summit and the connecting trails, so this one stayed on the white blazes all the way around.

The Cherokee Trail changes all the way around. There are flat stretches wide enough for three people side by side, inclines that turn to mud, sections so full of roots that you watch every step, and narrow places where the plants grow into the trail and a fallen tree leaves just enough room to get past. Some of it is sand, some dirt, some bare granite. It moves, too: when a tree comes down somewhere quiet, a new path forms around it, and when a storm washes out a stretch, people walk around that. It is a living trail.

The white blazes mark it the whole way. The connecting trails are orange or yellow. The one turn people miss is on the northwest side, where the Cherokee leaves the straight path and starts up the mountain toward the Walk-Up Trail. The blazes there are painted on a slab of granite at your feet, coming in from either direction and leading up as one line, so if you are not looking down you keep going straight, and the path straight ahead becomes a connecting trail.

That climb and the way down from it are the most treacherous stretch of any trail in the park. Right past the Walk-Up Trail, a sign with a figure slipping on the rock says the trail is closed when wet and sends you to the connector at the base of the Walk-Up Trail, and the same sign stands about every 100 feet on the way down. It is all slope, steep in places, granite with loose small stones and sand, with hardly a flat step on it, and in places I walk sideways to keep my footing. A little water makes the granite a slip and slide even in good shoes, and pine straw in the fall makes it worse. It is marked well, but few people come this way, and if you fall here you might not be found for a while, so carry a phone. I only walk it when it is dry, never after rain and never at night.

If it is wet, there are ways around it: stay straight on the orange connecting trail, or walk down the Walk-Up Trail and pick up the connecting trail from there. If it is dry, it is worth it. The views are almost private, and at the bottom there is a quiet stretch with streams in the spring that feels 5 to 10 degrees cooler than the rest of the trail.

On that connecting trail, about 500 feet past the turn, water seeps out of the bare granite all year, even when everything else is dry. The rock splits in sheets that follow the mountain's surface, and rain that soaks into those cracks higher up runs along them and comes out here. Expect a wet, green, slippery patch.