jeff newman
Destination:
Alabama
Exploring Red
Mountain Park
By Mark Kelly
“
W
hoa.”
It doesn’t
qualify as an
exclamation, since it comes in
a matter-of-fact tone that’s just
a notch above deadpan. It is
an expression not of awe but
of awareness—the sudden and
immediate appreciation of one’s
place in the landscape, the world,
the universe.
I turn to look at my 9-year-old son
who is chewing a mouthful of peanut
butter and jelly sandwich and gazing
placidly at the woods around us. His
little sister beats me to the question.
“
What is it?” asks Hannah. Wilson is
silent for longer than she cares to wait,
and she’s about to ask him again when
he replies, with typical older-sibling
vagueness, “I’m just looking.”
The three of us are sitting on the
trunk of a fallen sweetgum tree just off
the Ike Maston Trail. This is part of a
network of nearly 11 miles of hiking/
biking trails that veins Alabama’s 1,200-
acre Red Mountain Park. Located most-
ly within the city limits of Birmingham,
the mountain for which the park is
named was the primary source of the
rich iron ore deposits that prompted
the founding of Birmingham as the first
industrial center of the “New South” in
1871.
It was the city’s lifeblood for more
than a century afterward.
The forested slopes we’re traversing
were honeycombed with ore mines for
decades—the last of which was closed
in 1962—and crisscrossed by railroads
and tramways that transported Red
Mountain ore from the mines to the fur-
naces that dotted the area in and around
Birmingham. Among them was the
Birmingham Mineral Railroad, 150 miles
of track that encircled the city, with stops
or spurs at most of the area’s major mines
and furnaces. Operated by the Louisville
&
Nashville Railroad, the Mineral Line—
also known as the High Line—was
27
rails
to
trails
u
spring/summer.14
destination