Happenin’
Places › Georgia › Northwest Georgia › Rock City Gardens
Rock City Gardens

Photo: eebAMDG / CC BY-SA 4.0 · source

🎡 Attractions

Rock City Gardens

Lookout Mountain, GA · Northwest Georgia

About

A walking trail threads between towering ancient sandstone formations atop Lookout Mountain, past the 100-foot Mushroom Rock, across the swaying Swing-A-Long Bridge, and out to Lover's Leap, where on a clear day you can pick out seven states from a single overlook. The path ends underground in Fairyland Caverns, a series of black-lit dioramas of nursery-rhyme scenes built in the 1940s. Opened to the public in 1932, it is the attraction behind the barn-roof slogan that spread across the South: See Rock City.

Highlights

Getting there

1400 Patten Road, Lookout Mountain, GA 30750

Related places

Old Car City USA Attractions

Old Car City USA

White, GA · Northwest Georgia

Billed as the world's largest classic-car junkyard, this 34-acre forest swallows more than 4,000 vehicles built in 1972 or earlier, most of them rusting hulks from the 1950s and 60s with saplings growing up through their hoods. What began as a 1931 general store turned into a salvage yard, and the family who still runs it now charges photographers a few dollars more than walkers because that is who really comes: this is a photo pilgrimage, with 6-plus miles of pine-needle trails winding past moss-furred Fords and the famous "two-ton flowerpot" Chevy. Plan on several hours, wear real shoes, and note it is open Tuesday through Saturday, roughly 9 to 4. Bring a camera and let the rust and roots do the rest.

Tellus Science Museum Attractions

Tellus Science Museum

Cartersville, GA · Northwest Georgia

A Smithsonian-affiliate science museum off I-75 where a hall of full-size dinosaur skeletons gives way to a mineral gallery glittering with cut gems and raw crystals. Kids pan for gemstones and dig for shark teeth in the open-air Fossil Dig, then catch a show under the dome of the planetarium. The 120,000-square-foot building also keeps a hangar of vintage aircraft and a working observatory for weekend stargazing.

Booth Western Art Museum Attractions

Booth Western Art Museum

Cartersville, GA · Northwest Georgia

Behind a Bulgarian-limestone facade an hour north of Atlanta sits the largest permanent exhibition space for Western art in the country, where Remington bronzes and sweeping Bierstadt landscapes share the floor with movie posters and saddles. A presidential gallery lines up signed letters and portraits of every U.S. president, and a hands-on ranch space lets kids rope and saddle up while the grown-ups linger over the Russells. It is a genuinely strange and wonderful thing to find the American frontier rendered in such depth in small-town Georgia.

Part of these collections

Curated guides that feature Rock City Gardens.

Georgia Attractions45 places

Georgia Attractions

The Georgia stops worth building a day around. Atlanta's Coca-Cola vault and a whale shark the size of a school bus, the oak-shaded squares of Savannah, a visionary's painted folk-art compound in Buena Vista, FDR's Little White House, and a 56-foot sheet-metal chicken in Marietta. The famous, the historic, and the gloriously strange.