Freedom Hills

The Freedom Hills Overlook, at milepost 317 of the Natchez Trace Parkway in Colbert County, stands on the highest ground the parkway reaches in Alabama. A steep paved trail about 1,100 feet long climbs from the parking area to a summit of roughly 830 feet by U.S. Geological Survey elevation data, a little higher than Woodall Mountain, the 806-foot high point of Mississippi, about 13 miles to the west-northwest. The motor road crests on the same ridge at about 775 feet.

The height comes from a cap of much younger rock. For about four and a half miles around the overlook the state geologic map puts the road on the Gordo Formation of the Tuscaloosa Group: cross-bedded sand, gravelly sand and lenses of red and purple clay laid down in the Late Cretaceous, about 90 million years ago, its lower part a gravelly sand of chert and quartz pebbles. North and south the road drops some 300 feet off the cap onto Mississippian rock over 320 million years old: the gray shales of the Pride Mountain Formation, named for Pride Mountain, farther east in Colbert County, then the cherty, crinoid-rich Tuscumbia Limestone, named in 1894 for exposures at Tuscumbia. More than 200 million years of record are missing at the contact. The Cretaceous gravel that caps a stretch of the parkway in southern Tennessee gives out about eight miles short of Alabama; in the Freedom Hills, Cretaceous sand and gravel hold the high ground again.

The federal ecoregion map places the ridge in the Transition Hills, the highest part of the Southeastern Plains, where Cretaceous sand, clay and gravel overlie older limestone, shale and chert under oak, hickory and pine.