Walden Ridge

Walden Ridge is the eastern strip of the plateau, the wall you see from the Tennessee Valley. It runs about seventy-four miles from near Crossville to the Tennessee River, eight to ten miles wide and generally near 2,000 feet on top, and its east face drops more than a thousand feet to the towns along its foot. On the west it falls to the Sequatchie Valley. Its high point is Hinch Mountain, 3,048 feet, near Crossville.

At its south end the river cut straight through it. The Tennessee River Gorge, once called Walden Gorge and known locally as Cash Canyon, runs twenty-six miles with Prentice Cooper State Forest on its north rim, and the plateau across the water goes on south as Sand Mountain. Before Hales Bar Dam raised the river in 1913, boatmen knew its hazards by name: Suck Shoals, the Pot, the Skillet, the Pan, and a ten-mile stretch called the Narrows. People have lived in the canyon for at least 10,000 years. Since 1981 the Tennessee River Gorge Trust has been putting it back together, and by 2018 it had secured 17,000 of the 27,000 acres it set out to protect.

Farther north, North Chickamauga Creek rises in a part of the ridge called the Horseshoe and has cut a gorge about ten miles long into the sandstone above Soddy-Daisy. The state’s 7,093-acre natural area there holds ten listed plants, among them the federally threatened large-flowered skullcap and the endangered Virginia spiraea, along with pockets of old tulip poplar, yellow buckeye and basswood. The Bowater Pocket Wilderness was folded into it in 2006.