This place was, I think, scary in a certain past life.”
Gaston Farmer makes this somber declaration as we gaze at the skeletal chassis of an ancient sedan, rusted beyond recognition and bizarrely come to rest on a shady slope on Lookout Mountain, a short drive outside and some 1,300 feet above downtown Chattanooga. How the wreck ended up here, on what’s now a nature preserve, is anyone’s guess. Farmer, who is twenty-nine, is Chattanoogan both by pedigree (his great-great-grandfather served as mayor in the 1880s) and by inclination: A devoted mountain biker, backpacker, ice climber, and fly fisherman, he once pedaled the Continental Divide from the Canadian Rockies to Mexico. He and I have just scampered up a steep rise from the plunge pool of Lula Falls, a rapturous 110-foot-high cascade that’s lured visitors for generations: Cherokee families, bear
