The first time I drove up the mountain to Sewanee: The University of the South, all I saw was a shadowy landscape so drenched in mist the car headlights could barely illuminate the road. By the next morning, though, the famous blanket of Sewanee fog had lifted, and I knew almost immediately that I had never been to a more stunning place. I’m not alone in that opinion: Last week, the Princeton Review, pulling from surveys of some 170,000 students at 391 schools, ranked what Sewanee folk call “the Domain” as the prettiest campus in the United States.
“We’re delighted to be recognized as the most beautiful campus in the country,” vice-chancellor Rob Pearigen told me. “Our 13,000-acre Domain is at the heart of the Sewanee experience.” The Sewanee Mining Company donated ten thousand of those acres back in 1857 and 1859 during the university’s inception, and while the snippet of campus where the cluster of academic buildings sit is just a tiny patch, relatively speaking, it’s a captivating one. These buildings—down to the cafeteria and including the crown jewel, All Saints’ Chapel—are Gothic Revival–style visual delights featuring locally quarried sandstone.
But during the four years I spent studying literature and biology there, it was always the rest of the campus that called. From two lookout points, the Cross and Green’s View, the Tennessee landscape spills out below in a patchwork of green, zoomed-out vistas that remind you you’re floating up on the Cumberland Plateau—a thousand-foot-high tabletop in the Southern Appalachian mountains—and that the bluffs, streams, caves, and forests are yours to explore.
Once, while hiking to Bridal Veil Falls, I watched a bright orange salamander, Eurycea lucifuga, creeping across a mossy rock face. Another time, on a caving excursion, I admired a furry gray bat clinging to the cool wall, asleep. In Abbo’s Alley, a lush path that winds near the heart of campus, I learned to identify birds by their songs. I spent a summer raising newts in a pond on the golf course. Three times, I hiked the Perimeter Trail, a twenty-mile loop of the entire campus that reveals so many pockets of wild beauty that you end the day with aching legs but saturated in appreciation for the natural world.
The truth is, anyone who has spent time at Sewanee has a favorite corner of the Domain. For director of athletics (and my old tennis coach) John Shackelford, it’s a little courtyard in the middle of campus where a lone ginkgo tree stands and spectacularly sheds its leaves all at once every October. For Pearigen, it’s the soaring grandeur of All Saints’ Chapel, host to graduation and other landmark moments along the way in a student’s journey. For herpetology professor Kristen Cecala, it’s tranquil Lake Dimmick or an ephemeral wetland at the end of bumpy, unpaved Breakfield Road, where she studies spotted salamanders and all other manner of amphibians. For my sister and fellow alum, it’s the staircase of the Cross memorial, where her husband proposed.
For me, it’s a certain bluff in Shakerag Hollow, where I like to sit and dangle my legs off the edge and look over the familiar old-growth forest, full of towering oaks and hickories framed by feathery ferns and studded with boulders and the logs of fallen giants, which give nutrients and shelter to an assortment of tiny lives. There are fresh secrets to uncover, too—earlier this year, professor Jon Evans discovered a new species of flower in Shakerag and named it Phacelia sewaneesis. This fall, I’m heading back to the mountain for a visit, and I can’t wait to get lost in the Domain—and all the details of its beauty—again.
