Chattanooga’s mountain wonderland

Rock City—a storied tourist site outside Chattanooga, Tenn.—is equal parts cheesy, bizarre, and beautiful, said Rachael Maddux in Garden & Gun. While growing up, I made countless visits to this deeply weird park on northwest Georgia’s Lookout Mountain, created in the 1920s by an avid horticulturalist and lover of folklore. To my young eyes, Rock City was a wonderland of boulders, lookouts, winding paths, and fairy-tale statuary. I recently returned with friends, entering through an overstuffed gift shop. But soon we were strolling paths lined with rhododendron and skipping with the kids across footbridges past plaster gnomes making moonshine. We stopped at the spot that promises a view of seven states and wound up at Fairytale Caverns, where we descended a purple-lit stairwell into darkness. Niches in the rock held miniature fairy-tale scenes. Just as I’d hoped, “my friends kept looking at one another, bug-eyed and laughing.”