Rock formation now open to the public

HYTOP, Ala. -- After waiting nearly three decades to visit the jagged rock formation known as the Walls of Jericho, Olivia Howard was stunned by the view.

Howard, a member of the Birmingham Sierra Club, gazed up at the semicircle of limestone walls towering around her. The bluffs resemble an ancient Greek theater smack in the wilderness of northeast Alabama on the Tennessee state line.

Normally bathed in the waters of the Paint Rock River, which typically shoots through rock holes and crevices, the formation was mostly dry and easily accessible because of weeks of arid weather when Howard and a group of hikers visited.

"Oh, I love it," Howard told The Decatur Daily. "The rock formations and riverbed are very interesting. I want to come back up and see the water."

Most hikers couldn't visit the Walls of Jericho until recently because it was on private property, and few people knew how to reach it.

The Nature Conservancy bought the land in 2003 and sold it to Alabama's Forever Wild Program, which purchased about 12,500 acres that included the formation. The area is now open to the public with well-marked trails for hiking and horseback riding.

But the seven-mile round trip is steep in places and can be treacherous after a rain.

The Walls of Jericho gets its name from a traveling minister who found it in the late 1800s and decided the cathedral-like beauty was so captivating it needed a biblical name. The 150-foot-wide natural amphitheater sits between 200-foot-tall walls.

For more information, go to nature.org/success/jericho.html.