Pigeon Mountain

Pigeon Mountain is an arm of the plateau about ten miles long, joined to Lookout Mountain at its southwest end so that the two make a V with McLemore Cove in the fork. It rises west of LaFayette to about 2,330 feet, and most of it is state land, the Crockford–Pigeon Mountain Wildlife Management Area of some 20,600 acres. About thirty families lived on top in the 1920s and 1930s and left when the water table dropped. The state leased the mountain in 1969.

The bigger mountain is underneath. Ellison’s Cave has more than twelve miles of known passage and a vertical extent of 1,063 feet, and inside it Fantastic Pit falls 586 feet in one drop, one of the deepest pits in the lower forty-eight. Its neighbor, Pettyjohn’s Cave, has 31,490 feet of passage. Both are on public land, and anyone going onto it needs a state land use permit or a hunting or fishing license. On top, at Rocktown, the caprock stands in sculpted blocks that people compare to Rock City across the Tennessee line.

In spring the attention moves to a cove called the Pocket. From mid-March to mid-April the Shirley Miller Wildflower Trail there is, by the reckoning of the people who keep track, the best wildflower walk in Georgia, and it ends at a waterfall. In September 1863 a Union force under James Negley set out to cross the mountain and take LaFayette, learned the Confederates were massing at Dug Gap, and turned back.