Rock City plans new gondola to bring visitors up the mountain
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (WDEF) — Rock City announced at a Lookout Mountain planning meeting that it plans to construct a new gondola system that will take passengers from the base of lookout mountain, all the way up to Rock City.
Pepper Raper, Public Relations Manager for Rock City Enterprises told us, “We’re reimagining basically how you come up to Rock City, so instead of driving up the curvy Mountain Road, we intend for people to load at our base area which is known as Blowing Springs farm and then it’s about a six minute ride on a gondola up here where then they will come into a new mountain top entryway and then proceed on into Rock City Gardens”
Rock City is working with Doppelmayr, a firm based in Utah to design and build the gondola system. The attraction asked the planning commission to rezone a 14 acre tract of land next to Rock City to commercial so they can build their top of the mountain loading point.
Pepper Raper says, “So right now we’re in the approval phase. We aren’t quite sure how long it will take. We’re hoping we’ll have an answer by March. After that we’ll begin the design phase which will be about six to nine months. The earliest anything could happen up here would be January, 2027 but again it’s hard to commit to that because it’s all going to depend on approvals.”
They say that this will cut down on both traffic and noise for their fellow Lookout Mountain residents.
Ms. Raper told us, “Traffic has been one of the main complaints we’ve gotten from our lookout Mountain neighbors and residence and we can totally understand that concern. We’re really excited to provide the solution because it will take as many as 3000 cars off of the road on some of our busier nights as well as cut down on noise sometimes people getting in in their cars, cars, door, slamming, and kids and things like that can cause a lot of additional noise so this will also help with that issue.”
Rock City told us that this is not meant to compete with the already existing Incline Railway.
