Stone Mt. - Needs to be dynamited

[Awsi Dooger]

59. I really enjoy walking up and down Stone Mountain

I've done it for more than 40 years and hope to do it for decades more.

Feels like quite an accomplishment, especially that final stage up after the rest hut. Coming down is a snap other than a very steep area where they give you hand rails for maybe 80 feet.

Walking that mountain is so much fun I make it a destination almost every year while driving back toward Miami. I plan to do it again in mid October this year.

That park is so much more than a mural. That's what I'm saying. I have played golf at Stone Mountain countless times. The first hole and ninth hole in particular have wonderfully interesting elevation changes compared to what I'm used to in Miami. I've also camped many times. Marvelously peaceful.

The area where you walk up the mountain has a museum but it's not devoted to the Civil War. It is mostly anthropology.

The central area across from the hotel is a long way away and includes the cable cars, which most people us. The nearby white building facing the carving has a Civil War history film that is not pro-Confederacy but it does give each side more balanced detail than most films of that type. I've never found it inappropriate. Outside on the wall facing the carving they have an audio system where you push the button and receive a description of Stone Mountain and the history of the carving.

As a kid in the early '70s I remember very well when the carving was finished. We were returning from a trip to Chicago then down to New Orleans and visited Stone Mountain before returning to Miami. To demonstrate what a different era this was, while driving through Alabama state troopers had a road block and were stopping every car solely to attach a George Wallace bumper sticker. I wish I were kidding. This was after Wallace had been paralyzed. My dad refused. That did not go over well, to say the least. Two officers tried to intimidate my dad but he would not back down. When we drove away one patrol car followed us all the way to the state line, basically tailgating us the entire time with one guy on the police radio, or pretending to be. My sister and I had our heads turned and were watching in astonishment. It was at least 20 miles to the state line.

So keep that in mind while evaluating 1972 and the mood when that mural was completed. It wasn't as far into the civil rights era as we'd prefer to believe.

I've spent considerable time in that area facing the carving. There are plaques for every confederate state. Little winding trail. Fake snow. I've never heard anybody celebrating the men on that carving. Mostly it's families showing their young kids a strange sight on a mountainside and the kids reacting in wide eyed amazement while begging to go on the cable car up and down. That's the realty of Stone Mountain that I've known.