Monday/Tuesday March 3/4 2025 -Tennessee road trip days 5/6 - Savage Gulf State Park near Beersheba Springs TN - 1 hike, 7.3 miles and 870 feet elevation gain

Monday morning we packed up from the state park cabin and had breakfast and did laundry and had breakfast at a charming cafe in Camden TN.  The rest of the day was spent having fun and getting to Nashville in the evening.  We had a really adventurous dinner at Inchin’s Bamboo pan-Asian cafe near our hotel.

Savage Gulf (or as I more often think of it, the Stone Door) is an amazing area in SE Tennessee where the elevated Cumberland Plateau gives way to a deep river valley.  With our friend from Vermont not joining us on this trip we’ve juggled our to-do list to fit our solo trip.  This hike would have otherwise probably happened the day after we left Memphis but going as a day trip from Nashville meant going when there were only a few cars in the parking lot instead of weekend crowds.

The drive there took us out along US-70S, much of which is an expressway now.  I don’t remember the route I used to take but this was a different way to go and it was nice seeing the sparsely populated areas along that road.  The trails all start at a ranger station and trailhead at the top of the gulf..  If we’d gotten an earlier start our didn’t have evening plans it would have been good to walk down through the stone door and then climb out but that’s a really long challenging hike with over 1100 feet of elevation gain over more than 9 miles of trail.  We started out walking the Big Creek Rim trail which goes along the edge of the canyon with a lot of great overlooks, some of them intimidatingly close to the edge.  The weather was warm (in the 60’s) and low humidity but it was VERY windy.  Mostly the wind was high up and just made for some terrific noise down at trail level.  When we got to the junction where we had to decide between going down to the bottom of the gulf or not it was clear that we’d be very very tired after that hike and also not back to Nashville until 7.  Instead we looped back on a different trail that stays on top of the plateau called the Laurel trail.  I’m sure it was the right more.  The Laurel trail wasn’t a tough walk but those last 2.9 miles seemed very long.

We got back in the car about 3 pm and headed for dinner at Rafferrys in Nashville with John.  The drive was not easy as we got close to Nashville but overall we got to our destination faster than predicted so that was good.  Dinner was great and other than watching one episode of Worst Cooks of America we couldn’t wait to get to sleep when we got back to the hotel.












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