The Pinhoti Trail emerges from the south side of a crooked country lane called the Salem Church Road. Peer back down the welcoming footpath in the direction of the Talladega National Forest, into a bucolic landscape, a scattering of pines and hardwoods, a darkening canopy above, a carpet of needles and leaves below.

Turn to the north and the scene, the landscape, the feeling, is different. The Pinhoti loses its way, disappearing into a clear-cut landscape where matted limbs cover the ground, thick and bouncy, like a soiled mattress, stumps stud the gentle hillside, an open sky hovers above.

Beyond the clear cut, where the trail again gains definition, is a dam at the foot of a stream called Hurricane Creek. The tiny pond backs up to the face of a limestone wall. In the far corner of it there is the opening of a wide cave or perhaps a rock overhang. North of here, around the Little River Canyon, archaeologists spend time excavating the floor of such places, finding ample Native American artifacts. The floor of this cave is under water.

Up the creek, the trail works its way along a tight narrow valley called Hawkins Hollow, crossing the fast moving water and then climbing steeply up the side of the valley, were it winds through a series of ridge lines, mountain tops and valleys to reach out and touch Georgia.

This, the last stretch of Alabama’s Pinhoti Trail, tells both the story of our state’s reality and of what it so often is and can be. The trail lost in a clear cut, the brutal ugliness of that north side of Salem Creek Road, is a picture of forest policy that is both an avenue for economic tourism and a living postcard of a beautiful state.

Beyond the pond, out of Hawkins Hollow and across the ridge, the hiker enters nature and the state at its best. A long stretch of the land between here is in a land program called Forever Wild. It is undisturbed and shall be that way as long as any hiker is on this earth.

The hiker is in Cherokee County, closing in on a place called Indian Mountain, really a land formation that stretches to the northeast into Georgia. It is stunningly beautiful, and will remain that way thanks to Forever Wild, a program that has been in place since voter in Alabama passed a constitutional amendment in 1992 to fund it with offshore gas and oil revenues.

The program allows the state to purchase private land form willing landowners for public recreational purposes, nature preserves and wildlife management areas. In the last 15 years the program has purchased a stretch of 80 acres that runs along the trail here and 52 other tracts around the state.

What it has bought here and elsewhere in the state, is priceless, especially when you consider the clear cut at the start of the trail. If the entire distance was like that, it would not be worth a trip out.

Because of Forever Wild, near the apex of a hill on Indian Mountain you can stand on a rock outcrop just above where the Pinhoti snakes around a bend and look out over wildness that cannot look much different from the way the Cherokee themselves saw it, before the advent of the clear cut.

From Indian Mountain, some downhills and a few steep climbs await you, before again trekking along ridgelines and saddles, twisting and turning through the oaks, and pines, over moss covered limestone and fallen trees, past the now familiar white diamond Pinhoti Trail marker — the black turkey foot print stamped dead center — around depressions and trenches that look to be manmade, skirting a decaying hunter’s camp to the top of a hill jammed with boulders that is Flagpole Mountain. Here too, at 1968 feet high, it seems you can see forever. Though you know you cannot, you are certain you can see Georgia, to the west, far beyond the jutting ridge looming before you, but also 100 yards at your feet.

Here is the end of our journey.

GEORGIA is carved nicely into a board, set atop a 4x4 wedged down into a scattering of rocks stacked up for support, the new flag of our sister state flutters hard with the acrid wind of a late winter afternoon. A hiker pulling our way is met by the other side of the sign, a welcoming ALABAMA.

On down the mountain, across a meandering ridge, and into and out of a wide valley and a rushing stream, is that high ridge in the distance and across it is a road called Jackson Chapel, and beyond that are miles and miles of Georgia woods, thickets, streams, hills and finally a place called Springer Mountain where yet another adventure can be found at the terminus of the Appalachian Trial, a narrow avenue that will take you to Maine if you take up the invitation.