Lookout Mountain: Rock City & Ruby Falls

Lookout Mountain rises 1,700 feet above Chattanooga on the Tennessee-Georgia line — a long plateau top that has been the site of Civil War battles, Victorian resort hotels, and since the 1930s, the most visited tourist attractions in the mid-South. Rock City Gardens on the summit is a 14-acre rock garden built on the natural boulders and caves of the mountain crest — a series of passageways through the rock formations, the 1,000-ton Balanced Rock, and Lover's Leap overlook with the famous seven-state view. Ruby Falls 1,120 feet underground in the same mountain is a 145-foot illuminated underground waterfall discovered in 1928 by cave explorer Leo Lambert while drilling for a tourist elevator shaft — and still the deepest commercial cave and largest underground waterfall open to the public in the United States. Together the two attractions represent the golden age of roadside American tourism at its most exuberant.