The top of Stone Mountain is a kind of pilgrimage.
People come from far and wide—some for the climb, some for the sweat, and others just for the view. Standing there, high above the plains, it’s easy to believe you’ve reached something untouched—a pure piece of the world, unspoiled beneath your boots.
But the rock remembers.
In the 1850s, a man named Aaron Cloud, one of the town’s first dreamers, raised a 160-foot wooden tower at the summit. It swayed in the wind and scraped the sky. Poorly anchored, it toppled in a gale and was never rebuilt.
Human traces linger still.
There’s the chain-link fence keeping wanderers safe from the edge, the cables of the sky-lift that hum in the breeze, the visitor center below. But look closer—iron posts drilled into the granite, long ago used to winch supplies or steady the carving on the mountain’s north face.
