G.A.S.P.

The following day (3-22) was scheduled to be a fairly short one, in part because we had been warned about a major climb in the middle of the day.  My friend Rusty (and a couple of other people) had mentioned that Monteagle Mountain might be a difficult one.  Based on these comments, I had looked at the map and noticed some severe bends in the road just north of the town of Monteagle.  I assumed the bends to be an indication that we would have to climb up and then roll down a large mountain.   We left Jasper mentally prepared to meet this challenge.

We weren’t mentally prepared, however, for a major climb right out of Jasper, but that’s just what we got.  It was about 3 1/2 miles long, and near the top got to be pretty steep (about 5 1/2 to 6 percent).  At the top, Gene said something like “and that’s not even the big one.”  The next 15 miles or so were just pleasantly up and down as we approached the town of Monteagle.  The closer we got though, the more something didn’t look quite right – there just wasn’t a big mountain looming right in front of us.   Well it turns out that the joke was on us – the town of Monteagle is at the top of the mountain, and the bends shown on the map were a long winding downhill.  Seems we had reached the Cumberland Plateau on our first climb out of Jasper and just stayed up there until the plateau ends just north of Monteagel.  Coming south (from Nashville), this would certainly be a major climb, but coming our direction, it was just a major relief.