Cloudland Canyon State Park
Hiking in Cloudland Canyon State Park, GA | January 2023
The morning of our last full day around Chattanooga was supposed to be rainy, so we decided the night before that we would sleep in and be productive in the morning, then spend the afternoon hiking at a nearby state park. It seemed like a great plan, until we woke up and there was no rain, and being productive inside isn’t as fun when you think about the things you could be doing outside. Still, we powered through some tasks and then got ready to go for our hike around noon. It’s a good thing we were able to go out, because Charlotte started getting antsy as the hours passed — I guess she had grown to love our routine of hiking every day as much as we had!
While the rain had cleared, the area still had a strong wind advisory, but we thought that just applied to the higher elevation areas and not where we were. But when we arrived at today’s park, Cloudland Canyon State Park, the park ranger at the entrance station warned us that a power line was down on the main road! We studied a map and saw that the trail we intended to hike was still accessible, so we paid our fee and made our way to the West side of the canyon.
We started on the West Canyon Rim Trail, heading North up to the first views of the canyon. Curtis had planned a 5 mile loop trail around the West rim, which promised many views of the canyon and of high waterfalls coming down the canyon walls opposite of where we were. We were almost completely alone out here, and though the skies were gray it was still a great day to be out hiking.
While the views along the way were nice, the real highlights of this hike were seeing 3 armadillos (or the same armadillo 3 times — it would really have to be moving quickly through the woods for it to be the same one though). We had only ever seen live armadillos at the zoo, the only ones we’d seen in the wild were roadkill in Arkansas. Each time we saw one was so exciting — they’re so fun to watch! We kept our distance and Charlotte didn’t even notice.
At one point in the trail, we took a spur to go down into the canyon to hopefully see a waterfall. After switchbacking down to the stream and crossing over, we discovered that the trail to the waterfall sadly became metal stairs, which Charlotte doesn’t like, and decided to turn around. Sometimes we decide to walk on them anyway, if there aren’t too many and the reward is good enough, but since today’s hike was already pretty long we didn’t want to make her walk up and down these. Instead we turned around and finished our hike.
When we made it back to the car, we agreed that we enjoyed the hike, but it just didn’t wow us the way other hikes had on this trip. The state park was pretty cool, but we just felt it was missing something. As we were leaving, we noticed that the power line had been cleared and the road to the main part of the park was reopened, so we decided to drive to see a few more lookouts before leaving.
As it turns out, this was where all the best views were hiding! There were quite a few more people over here though, so we were still glad we had hiked on the West Canyon loop by ourselves. We ended up walking almost the whole overlook trail here as well, just to enjoy more views of the canyon and the waterfalls that we couldn’t see from the West side.
And that wraps up our last day in the Chattanooga area. We were glad we spent some time here and enjoyed the things that we did, but out of the three places we stayed (Chattanooga, Asheville, and Tellico Plains) it didn’t have quite as exciting hiking as the other places. However, the rental house we stayed in was our favorite of the trip! But I guess we didn’t even end up going into Chattanooga proper — the closest we got was overlooking the city on Lookout Mountain, so maybe we’ll have to come back someday after all!
