Fall Hollow is the parkway's other waterfall, and it is a lesson in what happens where hard rock lies on soft. Over the single mile between milepost 392.5 and milepost 391.5 the road loses about 320 feet and passes down out of the Fort Payne Formation, bedded chert and silicastone averaging about 250 feet thick, into far weaker Silurian limestones beneath it. Water coming off a cap like that has nowhere gentle to go. The Park Service gives the drop as twenty feet and says it can be heard almost as soon as a visitor leaves the car, before the trail brings it into view.
Twenty feet is one step of two. Lidar resolves a second below it, about twenty-five and thirty feet with a bench between, some fifty-five feet in all.
Almost nothing in the hollow has a name. The stream is unnamed in the federal names database and so is the waterfall, which leaves the Park Service as the only naming authority for either; the government record holds Fall Hollow itself only as a valley. The branch runs about nine tenths of a mile, dry for part of the year, and joins Big Swan Creek at the foot of the same descent, where the parkway crosses it. Big Swan reaches the Duck River in Hickman County, and its lowest sixteen miles, well downstream of the parkway, became a state scenic river in May 2026. The Park Service's 2014 assessment counted the hollow among its regularly sampled water-quality stations.
Getting there
35.5839, -87.4287
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
