Jomeokee Trail
In the winter of 2004, The Unturned Stone started construction on the Jomeokee Trail. The half mile loop circles Big Pinnacle, the dramatic peak of Pilot Mountain. Bare rock walls climb 200 feet and are capped with an island of trees and brush. Once a popular climbing location, Big Pinnacle is currently closed to climbing to protect a raven nesting ground. The Jomeokee Trail is comfortably wide and rolls gently with the landscape, making it suitable for even the most casual hikers. The trail was designed by Art Chard of George Finch/BONEY & Associates for the NC Division of Parks and Recreation.
We built over three hundred steps and edged several hundred feet of trail with stone curbing. Crib walls hold up some sections of the treadway, which is finished with a light colored sand-rock. Beautiful and sturdy stone columns and wooden hand rails welcome visitors at the trail head.
We built a stone culvert over a natural drainage point below Devil’s Den, so-called because of the cold air that always flows out of a recess in the pinnacle.
This close-up of the underside of the stone culvert shows the quartzite stone we used throughout the project. Though the stone was quarried from another location, it is geologically very smiliar to the quartzite that makes up Big Pinnacle. Quartzite is metamorphosed sandstone and extremely durable. The stone was purchased from Scott Stone.
The National Guard donated their time to the park to stage the materials around the pinnacle. They used this job as a training exercise for their pilots and ground crews. Black Hawk helicopters airlifted approximately 600 tons of stone and sand-rock to 7 drop zones around the pinnacle. Our crew then moved the materials by hand using shovels, tracked barrows and winches.