The Boston Diaries

Tuesday, November 04, 2014

Judy Collins rock, or something like that

Our plans to have lunch with an old friend of mine fell through, so we found ourselves with a day sans plans. Bunny suggested we just head west to see what we could find, and with that nudge, I remembered two locations west of Brevard that we could visit.

First up, The Carolina Smokehouse, a pit-BBQ restaurant in Cashiers, NC we visited a few years ago and liked. Since we were headed that way anyway, that was as good a place to have lunch as any place. If you find yourself in that neck of the woods, it's a good place to stop off for some good barbecue.

After lunch, we turned north to Judaculla Rock, a large stone with a huge number of petroglyphs carved into it—the most in a stone found anywhere east of the Mississippi.

[It's hard to make out the petroglyphs due to erosion but they're there, all 100 or so.]

Despite being the middle of nowhere, it was easy to find as it was well marked with signs leading to its location, although parking was nearly non-existant, as it was sitting off the side of a dead-end road leading to a private residence.

Judaculla was a Cherokee god of hunting, and one of the petroglyphs is supposedly of his hand when he jumped down from his mountain home and used the rock to steady his landing. Also, The Devil's Courthouse is also known as “Judaculla's Judgement Seat,” supposedly where he judged the courage or virtue of the Cherokee.

We then made sure to drive back before it got dark. It's thrilling enough to drive the hairpin turns to keep from slaming into or off of the cliffs (or oncoming traffic) in full daylight; night time driving would crank that up to eleven.

Tomorrow, we head back south to Chez Boca …