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JW: Lookout Mountain is eighty-three miles long and here above Little R-River Canyon.
RM: We're a good bit above it now, I can feel the breeze. Things are beginning to pick up,
I guess
the air coming up from down below. Strange plant there, look at the flowers, just now
opening up,
hanging down, blowing in that breeze.
JW: Ones that look like a fringe . . .
RM: Yeah. (JW: . . . on a surrey.) Looks like a fringe on a surrey, and Fringe Tree is one
of the,
uh, common names for that. Old Man's Beard, or Grey Beard is another name for it. Really
blowing, though, in the wind, springtime flowers. They won't last long. Leaves are opposite
on that
tree, doing very well. And then look what's in the top!
JW: A tubular flower!
RM: Yeah, it's a vine that's climbed up into the top, flowering early and then it's-it's
rather
nondescript. Crossvine is the common name for that. Tubular flowers, of course, uh,
Hummingbirds would enjoy that and so would lots of insects coming to get nectar. Right
in the top
of that tree. Flowers everywhere, look at here on the ground. (JW: It's a vi- . . .) We
saw these,
you know, all along the way, here. (JW: It's a violet of some kind.) One of the violets,
but look at
the leaf. That's not a regular looking violet leaf. It reminded someone of the closed up
foot of a
bird, so Bird's Foot Violet is the, uh, common name. And doing very well here in the Springtime.
JW: Such a beautiful and delicate little flower, and what a beautiful place Lookout Mountain
was
for the Woodland Indians before the time of Christ; in more recent years the Cherokee
Indians
who hunted up here.
RM: Mmmhmm. And this park does give us a good opportunity to get some spectacular views
in
a, in a very safe way. Just take a look. . . (JW: A magnificent canyon!) . . . at that canyon.
Yeah,
it's really so much deeper than it was where we were a little while ago. Rock outcropping
on the
far side, and then the near side - where's all the rock that used to connect those two?
JW: Gone down the river, I guess!
RM: Gone down the river, it's the work of Little River right down there that has made
this canyon what it is.
JW: You know we, and I'm sure people wonder, how does a river begin and form and flow on
top
of a mountain?
RM: all right, well that's a real good question, you know, that's, uh, that's-that's the big
question
here. What about the layering of rock that we're looking at there? How did those rocks
form, first
off?
JW: I guess when an ocean or shallow sea was here.
RM: Right, sedimentary rock, the limestone was in oceans, the sandstone was piled up
on top of
that, probably in a, could be a freshwater or an ocean situation. Compressed to form
layers of
rock. And then something happened about three hundred million years ago. Africa bumped into
North America, folded a lot of rock to the East, caused this rock to begin to rise in
the form of
(JW: Uh, it be- . . .) a plateau.
JW: It became the river as well at the same time. It was . . .
RM: The river was here, perhaps at that time or soon thereafter, and as the rock came up,
the
river began to cut down. And just look off in this direction, now if you want to talk
about a deep
canyon, see that's, what?, eight hundred feet, maybe, down there in the distance. Very sheer-
walled, relatively narrow canyon. And the only way to get that is to have-have uplift
occurring at
the same time as a river is cutting down through the rock. And that is exactly what's happened
here. And that river then, somebody want to talk about an old river . . . (JW: This is
an old . . .) . . .
that is an old river! That river has been flowing a long time, and now it's taking material
that used
to be here, carrying it down, and eventually dumping it into the, uh, Gulf of Mexico, I
guess it
would be a Bay!
JW: This has been called the-the largest canyon East of the Rockies.
RM: Well, it is a phenomenal view, and you see the plants, of course, that have come
in and-and
filled in the sides there. But the river is still slowly but surely wearing it even deeper
and cutting it
even wider than it is right now. Let's see if we can figure out how to get down to the
bottom of that
canyon and take a look at it from the bottom once again.