Park rangers acted as traffic directors at the entrance to the North Chickamauga Creek Gorge State Natural Area early Monday afternoon, facing an onslaught of Labor Day adventure-seekers.
"The lot is full," one worker told those in passing cars while waving them onward on Montlake Road. "I can't let you in until someone else leaves."
The area, known as the Pocket Wilderness, is a story of restoration. Long a destination for illegally dumped trash, it is now a popular hiking and swimming destination within 20 miles of downtown Chattanooga, a community embracing every outdoor opportunity.
With the uptick in popularity, though, comes scenes like the one that transpired after a June 7 rope-swing accident about two miles from the Montlake Road trailhead. More than 60 volunteer firefighters and rescue personnel from nine agencies spent more than four hours transporting an injured 26-year-old woman out of the woods.
On average, 30-50 of the approximately 225 calls to the Mowbray Volunteer Fire Department each year come from the Pocket Wilderness, Mowbray fire chief Chris Weddington said. Officials with the Cumberland Trail State Park that oversee the Pocket Wilderness are eyeing a change that could make rescues less strenuous for volunteer agencies like Weddington's.
"We are planning to open the path to allow vehicular access as far as the blue hole swimming area," said Cumberland Trail State Park manager Bobby Fulcher. "We would have an easier time with rescues and with enforcement and protection of the park."
The proposal is still in its early stages and the details are not yet hashed out. However, a path to the popular swimming hole would allow emergency personnel on utility vehicles access to the area's interior, where thrill-seekers continue to find isolated locations to hang rope swings along the creek. It's a back-and-forth battle with the park rangers, who cut down the rope swings placed in clear sight.
"They just decided they'd set them up farther back into the woods," Weddington said. "So now it just takes longer than what it did before to get them out when they get hurt."
At its beginning, the trail is a wide and flat layer of small rocks that could easily accommodate a utility vehicle. Soon after, it becomes rocky and narrow with climbs and descents that lead hikers along Mowbray Mountain. By the standards of many outdoor enthusiasts, it's not an especially difficult trail. RootsRated, the locally based national outdoor recreation website, gave it two out of five stars for difficulty. But accidents - many of them involving the creek - continue to happen, and not even emergency personnel are immune.
A Sale Creek firefighter rolled his ATV in the Pocket Wilderness on June 13 while assisting with the rescue of an injured 22-year-old hiker. On Sept. 2, nearly 30 emergency personnel helped rescue a state park employee who rolled an ATV.
"The patient, you're having to carry them anywhere from a mile and a half to three miles up into the woods and sometimes up to six miles through treacherous terrain to the creek," Weddington said. "And then you have to line people up in the creek to pass the patient across the creek to the six-wheeler, where we can actually extradite the patient from there.
"There's always a safety risk for the responders. You've got to figure, you're pulling multiple agencies to unfamiliar terrain."
Fulcher, who oversees the entire 11-county Cumberland Trail State Park, does not yet have a projection of when the new path - if approved - might be completed.
"We are very aggressively doing other construction work that is also critical to our future," he said.
In the meantime, Weddington said, he plans to lobby District 1 Hamilton County Commissioner Randy Fairbanks for discretionary money so he can purchase better rescue equipment.
"People don't realize that when you go up there and get stupid and hurt yourself, it's not like falling in a parking lot where an ambulance can just pull up," Weddington said.
He joked recently with state park officials about an alternative solution.
"We need to build one great big swimming pool right there at the parking lot and have a concrete pad that goes right down to the pond," he told them. "And then we can just back the ambulance up when they break stuff. We'll just back it up there."
Contact staff writer David Cobb at 423-757-6249 or at dcobb@timesfreepress.com.