Blood Mountain

What was once a holy mountaintop for the Cherokee Indians has evolved into a sanctuary for many different tribes looking for their own spiritual sanity.

Before Europeans settled in the area, Blood Mountain, located on Ga. 180 in Union County, had been the Cherokee's home of the immortal Nunnehi, the people who live anywhere.

According to legend, these immortal beings were historians, musicians and artists who could alter their appearance at will and were known to not be able to resist flattery.

Today, hundreds of hikers who seem to draw life from the mountain's very name make the pilgrimage to its summit, making the mountain the most heavily traveled area of the Appalachian Trail in Georgia. One of them, who recorded his recent visit to the Nunnehi's home in a notebook at the mountaintop hiker's shelter, described his journey as a "great mental flossing, even on a cloudy day."

In the summer, these foot travelers feel their way through the ferns and wildflowers of the miles-long paths that lead to the height of Blood Mountain. There, they rest on its stony peak and watch the world from an immortal's perspective -- a perspective in which catawba rhododendron frames the northwestern sky.

That warm perspective, like the appearance of the Cherokee Nunnehi, is altered by the colder months that force the foliage from the hardwood trees.

In those months, the forest does not shroud the hiker with as much of its life-giving greenery or serenade it with the essential songs of the cicadas. Instead, it allows the unveiled sky to come down the mountain to greet its visitors at the beginnings of the boulder fields.

The satisfaction of each of the seasonal perspectives -- both spiritual experiences in their own rites -- is best earned hiking from the base of the mountain at Vogel State Park, although the view can be attained from shorter routes leading from the Byron Herbert Reece trailhead and Neel's Gap further south on U.S. 19.

With an elevation of 4,458 feet, Blood Mountain is the sixth-highest peak in Georgia.

Ashley Fielding