Dickey Ridge

Dickey Ridge Visitor Center is coming up on your left. It's seasonal, so the doors may be shut, but the walls inside are wormy chestnut if you find it open, and the best short walk at this end of the road doesn't need the building. That's the Fox Hollow Trail, which starts across the Drive. It's a mile and two tenths around, about forty-five minutes, with a three hundred and ten foot climb. The park rates it easiest. No pets on this one. Generations of the Fox family are buried along that trail, with only a few stones left. In spring you may find what they planted, frilly old daffodils and deep purple irises. On the ground is periwinkle, a vine called cemetery weed. In nineteen seventy-six Lemuel Fox Junior came back and remembered a blackheart cherry in that graveyard. He'd be plowing corn, he said, and he'd climb up, rest the horse and eat cherries. Many cemeteries in these mountains are still looked after by their families. A storm has since knocked that tree down, and the sun comes in where it stood.