Back in May 2006, a handful of trails enthusiasts were flirting with the idea of luring the makers of the Great Eastern Trail – a planned 10,000-mile alternative to the Appalachian Trail that may someday stretch from Florida to the Finger Lakes of New York and maybe west to North Dakota – through Chattanooga.
The newspaper wrote a story or two. Some readers rolled their eyes and muttered something to the effect that they would “believe-it-when-I-see it.” And most of us promptly forgot it.
Rick Wood, with the The Trust for Public Land, in 2007 talks about the existing Riverwalk, and plans to extend more trails in the Chattanooga area.
A rendering shows the proposed path of a trail connecting the Lula Lake Land Trust to Covenant College.About a year later, Trust for Public Land’s Rick Wood leaned over a huge table with a glass-covered map of the region and pointed to the color-coded dots that separated locally dreamed Chattanooga-specific finished trails and Tennessee Riverwalk areas from daydream paths.
Now some 10 years later, the daydreams are looking more real every day, and as Wood said then and probably at least a thousand times since: “So much of Chattanooga’s story is about our geography and about embracing our mountains and the river. This is just another way of being able to be connect to that.”
On Tuesday, we learned that the Chickamauga Dam and Cloudland Canyon near Rising Fawn, Ga., are just 2.9 miles of new trail away from being connected for ambitious hikers and mountain bikers.