An extremely different take on a very similar natural attraction....

One of the major 'hiking' attractions in the Atlanta area is the Stone Mountain Park. We really could not miss this one. With the American love for superlatives when advertising tourist destinations it was described as the world's largest exposed piece of granite and the third-largest monolith in the world (these are actually some of the more impressive superlatives. In some cases the descriptions become very specific and somewhat obscure to make a superlative...)

The granite landscape of the park is remarkably similar to Girraween National Park in good old Queensland, Australia. So I thought it would be interesting to add a few photos from a trip to Girraween in June last year (on the right). At first glance the landscape is where the similarities to Stone Mountain stop.

The granite face of Stone Mountain (left) is decorated - let's use some more superlatives - with the "the largest high relief sculpture in the world, the Confederate Memorial Carving, depicting three Confederate heroes of the Civil War, President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson" (wiki). It is the size of a football field (I don't know how that compares to a Cricket field but it must be awfully big). The carving is so big that the workers supposedly found shelter in a nostril of one of the horses during bad weather and the completion of the work was celebrated with a dinner party on a shoulder of one of the heroes. (The shot on the right shows the second of the two "Pyramids" in Girraween)

The carving up close.

Once you get up to the top - which most people do with the help of a cable car (we walked) - there is a full grown visitor centre with all the amenities one could wish for after the strenuous walk up that hill.... The summit snack provides an opportunity to replenish the valuable calories that were lost on the walk from the cable car to the visitor centre. The photo on the right shows the typical summit snack on a walk in Queensland.



The walking on this part of Stone Mountain is somewhat restricted which seems surprising in a free country where everyone is entitled to kill themselves by for example not wearing a helmet when riding a motorcycle. (The photo on the right shows the ascend to "The Pyramid" in Girraween)

However once you get around that fence... - let me rephrase that - we actually did not 'violate' the fence. We just walked around the base of the mountain and came up the other side ;-))


There you do not come across the fence and it is a very nice walk and relatively untouched considering the proximity to Atlanta.


The trees that grow on the most impossible spot in rock crevasses are as fascinating as the ones in Girraween.


There are even pretty flowers among the mosses and lichens....


... and impressive rock formations.


Coming back from this 'wild' part of the park the end of this wonderful day was again quite different. We had the chance to admire a fantastic laser show with firework lighting the carving.



The atmosphere was like a big fair, families were having picnics, ice cream and glow sticks were sold and country music was blaring to accompany the laser show.