“If the rush and sizzle of life make you hunger for durable goods, if your blood pressure goes up and down with the stock market or baseball scores or political polls, if you fret about pulling off the monthly balancing act in your checkbook, if the world has spun you dizzy–you would do well to spend some time in stony country.”
–Scott Russell Sanders

Listen carefully on any ridge up above the Red River Gorge, and you get a sense of the world that lurks down below. Wait until you hear a Pileated Woodpecker’s eerie, monkey-like shriek echoing off canyon walls. Soon you’ll hear it again, as the echoes echo off other walls, and then those again, until you are surrounded by a whole army of woodpeckers. Listen carefully, and you can almost imagine the gorge 250 years ago, before white settlers moved in and changed it forever.
The woodpecker’s call reverberates for so long, and evaporates so gradually, that eventually you can’t tell whether that’s your ears picking up sounds, or just your memory replaying them. When a gentle breeze blows, and leaves silence in its wake, you’re able to sense the huge empty space between the walls of the gorge. That hush merely hints at what is lost.
Something new excites your eardrums: from one of the valleys comes the sound of a grumbly-engined Jeep. A glowing red tail-light gives away its position (over there!), beneath the forest canopy, at the bottom of the gorge, alongside the Red River. Usually, however, from up above it’s impossible to accurately pinpoint the sounds’ origins. The forest is way too dense – although not compared with what it used to be.
The Red River Gorge is an abused place. For 200 years, entrepeneurs came to the Red River Gorge and stole as much as they could, destroying much of it in the process. They cut down all of the big trees. They dug into the ground to extract coal and iron ore. They polluted rivers. They drilled for oil and natural gas. They farmed so intensively that fertile land disappeared, and silt and mud clogged up the Red River. Then the US Army Corps of Engineers tried to dam the Red River itself. The region was so exploited that it has not yet recovered. The five poorest counties in America today – the top five! – are in the hills of Eastern Kentucky, not far from the gorge. That’s what happened to this place.
So when you hear the Pileated Woodpecker from up on that ridge, listen a bit more intently to her cry. We are lucky that bird still soars throughout the gorge, and we are lucky that the gorge was not transformed into a lake. At the same time, we are unlucky that so much of the gorge is gone forever. That mighty, crow-sized bird, and the golden canyon walls off of which her voice echoes are all that remain in what was once a very mighty place.

******* ******* *******

To describe the place as a network of walled canyons is no exaggeration. The geologic formations at the RRG remain unmatched anywhere on this Earth. Within a relatively small area of about 30 square miles lie over 100 natural arches of all different shapes and sizes. One of them, called Rock Bridge, spans a creek and was used for travel for centuries by Native Americans ; another arch is driveable, but it’s bumpy, only 15 feet wide, and far above the valley. The 500 foot-deep gorge is home to a maze of inescapable box canyons, huge overhanging caves, and one of the richest temperate forests on the planet, ripe with huge hemlocks, poplars, and oaks, thick patches of rhododendron, mosses, ferns, and mushrooms – and plenty of Kentucky’s most profitable crop: marijuana. Inside the gorge are over 1000 miles (yes, one thousand miles) of colorful, water-streaked sandstone cliffs, intricately featured and up to 300 feet tall. Surreal waterfalls – not bubbly cascades that splash down jumbled slabs, but tall, free falling, parabolic sluices, like Torrent Falls (162′) or Fincastle Falls (186′) – leap from the lips of those cliffs, and float freely for a few seconds as they descend deeper into the gorge.
A topographical map of the Red River Gorge is a fascinating thing. Look carefully for a spot free of contour lines – there is none! You won’t find a level 50 acre plot near the gorge – unless of course you pick the Red River floodplain. (And a floodplain, whether it belongs to the Mississippi River or the Red River, is not the smartest place to build a home. This wild and rugged gorge is a place not meant for human habitation.) Flat land simply does not exist near the gorge – pick any spot on the map, and it is either a ridge, a valley, or a slope connecting the two. The landscape is busy doing one thing: eroding.
Examine the 25-mile gorge for yourself and one fact about the terrain there is obvious: it is remarkably steep. So steep, that in the last 9 years 14 people have fallen to their deaths over the Red River Gorge’s cliffs. Two of those victims lost their lives in failed hang-gliding attempts off of a cliff called Raven’s Rock. Most of the victims, though, don’t intentionally leap off of the cliffs. An emerging pattern reveals that most victims are in their late teens and early 20s. Usually they are showing off, taking risks, hopping from rock to rock. Most are drinking alcohol: not the wisest cliffside behavior.
The fatalities at the gorge, however, do not fully portray how steep the gorge really is. It is the astounding number of people who injure themselves at the gorge that sheds light on the nature of the place. In the last 40 years, the United States Forest Service has rescued 1400 people in the gorge. These rescued folks deserve little sympathy: many walk off cliff edges at night while gathering firewood, or while searching for a nice spot to pee (usually without a flashlight). Peeing, it seems, deserves even less sympathy: On more than one occasion, a camper has tumbled over the edge of a cliff still in his sleeping bag, after hopping around in the dark like an inchworm, trying to stay warm while at the same time trying to heed the call of his bladder. Year after year, people visit the Red River Gorge, somehow unaware of sheer cliffs and the law called gravity. They underestimate the gorge, because, after all, it’s in the middle of Kentucky, not Wyoming.
The gorge is so steep that human paths snaking through it are rare. There exist fewer than 60 miles of officially marked trail in the gorge. A guidebook called Hiking Kentucky provides the following warning about foot travel in the gorge: “Because the vegetation is very think, off trail hiking is discouraged unless you are very experienced travelling through this kind of country. Lacking such experience, you might find yourself slogging through a ‘rhody hell’ that ends, unexpectedly, with a 300-foot drop.”. Scattered throughout the guidebook are similar caveats: ” Watch out for steep drop-offs.” “Look out for high cliffs, hidden drop-offs, and slippery sections.” “Be aware of exposed rocks…and watch for steep drop-offs.” The trails, though, do not nearly do the RRG justice – there is so much more to explore, but most of it requires a rope and a harness.
Paved roads are even fewer in the gorge. The landscape is just too steep. There are some old dirt logging roads, but most are so rugged that not much besides a tank could maneuver on them. Often their angles seem mellow in comparison to the looming cliffs, but it’s an illusion; even they are steep. For example: Last year I drove a Toyota Camry down a dirt road and into a valley without considering the return trip. After a full day of climbing, I hopped in the car, turned it on, pushed the gas pedal down, and made it no more than half way up the hill. Carefully, I backed down the hill, and tried again, with a little more umph. But the top of the hill still eluded me. Once more, I put the car in reverse and backed down to the bottom of the hill, wondering if the car and I were going to escape from the valley together. Not until the fourth attempt, when I unloaded everything I could, did the care make it up that dirt road. Now when I visit that valley, I park at the top of the hill, and I walk down.
Yet the steep terrain alone is the smallest hazard in the gorge. Water, in alliance with the steep terrain, has proven much deadlier. Sixty years ago so much rain fell in the gorge that a flash flood swept through one of the many narrow valleys. At the head of the flood, a wall of water 10 feet high roared over everything in its path. In that valley, under that water, 38 people drowned.
The gorge is steep, and the valleys within it are narrow. At the bottom of the gorge, the Red River is still flowing, slowly digging away, so the gorge only getting steeper.

******* ******* *******

The chunk of land halfway between the Chesapeake Bay and the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers is bursting with geologic wonders. Here the land’s skin is thin, revealing the massive stone skeleton underneath. You’ll find the Red River Gorge here, but it is only one among many incredible geologic creations.
Poke around southern Indiana, 150 miles northwest of the RRG, and you’ll find “the largest accessible deposit of premium building stone in the U.S.” The Empire State Building, Grand Central Station, the Pentagon, the Rockefeller Center, the National Cathedral, and 14 state capitols – to name only a few – are all built of limestone taken from huge quarries here.
Head southwest from the RRG 125 miles, and explore Mammoth Cave, the largest cave system on the planet by a factor of three. An astounding 350 miles of underground passageways have been mapped here, and, even better, experts admit it is likely that another couple of hundred miles of subterranean tunnels haven’t been found yet.
Go south 90 miles into Tennessee, and hunt around the Cumberland Plateau there; you’ll find more than 100 gorgeous waterfalls, just like the ones at the Red River Gorge.
Aim only 50 miles west of the RRG, up above the Kentucky River, and you’ll find a 60-foot tall freestanding limestone tower, as unlikely and precarious as a dozen Volkswagen Beetles stacked on top of each other. East of South Dakota’s volcanic Needles, you won’t find any other formation like this. The pinnacle stands as a monument, in tribute to the erosive forces that created it.
350 million years ago, when the Appalachian Mountains stood as tall as the Himalayas, and T-Rex and Triceratops had not yet evolved, a huge shallow sea, which stretched from Nebraska to Pennsylvania, covered Kentucky. At the time, the North American continent lay much further south – Kentucky was then just south of the equator – so that this tropical sea resembled the current shallows near the Bahamas. Underwater, gazillions of tiny shelled creatures lived their lives, their bodies settling to the sea floor. After millions of relatively calm years, those shells, made of calcium carbonate, accumulated in layers more than 700 feet deep. The building stone in southern Indiana, the passageways in Mammoth Cave, and the 60-foot tower alongside the Kentucky River are all made of ancient limestone built from those layers of shells.
Soon a river flowing from the snowcapped Appalachian mountains to the east began to drain into the sea, forming a delta over eastern Kentucky. The river deposited mud, silt, clay, sand, and pebbles on top the existing material, eventually piling up in layers hundreds of feet deep. The sea level dropped, the river changed its course, and the newly cemented layers of shales and sandstones were exposed to the elements.
Water began carving into the sandstone bed 70 million years ago. Because the Corbin Sandstone in eastern Kentucky is relatively hard, once water carved deep enough down to create a channel, it became confined to it. When the volume of water increased, instead of flowing out onto a floodplain, it could only dig out the sides and bottom of the channel even more. During the previous ice-ages, the volume of water flowing through the gorge increased dramatically with the runoff from enormous glaciers. While the glaciers themselves never crept further south than the Ohio River (60 miles north of the RRG), the torrents of meltwater from them are responsible for scouring and carving the overhanging canyons in the Red River Gorge. In that sense, water is to blame – or thank – for the Red River Gorge. Water lay the sand down millions of years ago, and water carved out the steep canyons.

******* ******* *******

The Red River Gorge is only a few hours drive from Charleston, West Virginia and Cincinnati, Ohio, and only one hour from Lexington, Kentucky. Yet the gorge remains relatively unknown and hidden. The RRG is also well protected under various state and federal designations. The RRG makes up only a tiny part of the Daniel Boone National Forest, which encompasses 640,000 acres and stretches130 miles south all the way to the Tennessee border. Natural Bridge State Resort Park, just west of the RRG, protects the largest arch in the area, and attracts more than 100,000 visitors each year. The Red River itself is a designated National Wild and Scenic River – the only one in Kentucky. The upper Red River and about half of the land in the RRG is protected as part of the Clifty Wilderness Area. Parts of the RRG are on the National Register of Historic Places. And others are National Landmarks. The slew of mechanisms aimed at preserving the RRG are relatively recent, though – and for many, too late.
Development at the RRG – while it does not compare in scale with Las Vegas’ encroachment on the desert, or Los Angeles’ endless sprawl – is still a growing concern. The four-lane Mountain Parkway, built in 1963, makes driving to the RRG easy, but it also cuts right through the gorge, making it difficult to find a place in the forest free of traffic-noise. The smaller roads in the gorge area are lined with varieties of ‘Appalachian roadside art’ – a go-cart track, a snake pit, a tacky motel, and a few fast-food joints. In just the last year a new gas station has been built, (just across the street from another gas station) complete with painfully bright fluorescent lights that shine all night long. In the Natural Bridge State Resort Park there is a ski lift– not because there’s good skiing come wintertime, but because the natural bridge sits atop a relatively small but steep hill that is apparently too much effort to walk up. As if the ski lift alone weren’t unnatural enough, there is a manmade lake for tourists to swim in. Thus the state park, in an effort to preserve a natural treasure, has destroyed much of what makes it so special. This phenomenon is nothing new, though. Conservation efforts across the country sacrifice some elements to protect others.
There is a cliff at the Red River Gorge that, to rock climbers, distinguishes the rock there from rock anywhere else east of the Mississippi River. The crag is called the Motherlode, and justifiably so. It is packed so dense with difficult and dramatically overhanging routes that rock climbers drool just thinking of it. The crag’s name is very fitting, but the crag was not named by rock climbers. The cliff is named after Mother Lode, Inc., the oil company that owns the land. Much of the land in and near the RRG is or was used by oil companies, and most of the oil and gas near the RRG was extracted long ago. From 1919-1925, over 23 millions barrels of oil valued at almost $60 million were taken from Lee county. And in Menifee county (the RRG straddles Lee and Menifee counties) for a three year period from 1908 through 1910, wells produced 4.5 million cubic feet of natural gas per day! When both of these deposits dried up, the people moved on, in search of other deposits. The rusty oil drills, tanks, shacks, and barrels however, remain scattered throughout the gorge.
Coal, like oil and natural gas, has left its mark on the land near the RRG. In the late ’70’s Kentucky passed West Virginia and became the highest coal-producing state in the U.S. One expert estimated that beneath eastern Kentucky’s hills are over 60 billion tons of coal. Obviously, the coal industry is vital to the livelihood of many Kentucky residents (and everyone who uses electricity created from burning that coal), but coal mining operations have proven disastrous to watersheds in eastern Kentucky. Silt, sulfur, acids, and poisonous minerals have turned streams and lakes yellow and made them unsafe to swim in. To name only a few streams not far from the RRG, Carr’s Fork, Flannagan’s Fork, and Pound River were all ruined from coal mine leachates.
Logging, though, has had more of a lasting impact in the RRG than any other extractive industry. Loggers first sought out giant timber in the gorge in the 1870’s. The trees they cut down were so big that it took two-person teams hours to chop just one of them down, and a team of oxen to drag the trunk from the forest down to the river. One tree, cut 60 miles south of the gorge in 1937, measured more than eleven and a half feet in diameter – making it the largest known tree ever to have existed in Kentucky! The loggers collected such timber in the river behind small splash dams, which, when blown up, released a flood strong enough to carry the logs downriver to mills. By the 1880’s, one mill on the Red River was the 2nd largest in the world, cutting an average of 200,000 board-feet per day. After the logs were cut, each logger stamped a unique insignia on the end of each of his pieces. The wood then continued floating downriver to the Ohio river, and then onward to towns on the Mississippi River, where it was collected and sold for astoundingly cheap prices.
When railroads arrived at the RRG at the turn of the century, the logging industry grew even more. Previously remote and inaccessible patches of forest could be reached via a short train ride, and transporting logs to the mills by rail proved much simpler than by river. In 1906, to reach one part of the RRG, railroad workers dug a narrow 700 foot-long tunnel through a thick sandstone ridge. Years ago the track was removed, and a one-lane road was laid down in it’s place. A drive through the Nada tunnel reminds visitors of the tragic history in the gorge. The timbermen were so completely thorough in logging that today, there is no virgin forest left in all of Cumberland plateau – including the RRG. That is the legacy the loggers left future generations. Perhaps that is what the Pileated Woodpecker is always crying about.

******* ******* *******

While many elements of the Red River Gorge are gone forever, the place is still incredible and captivating, and one of the most dramatic areas east of the Mississippi River. Whereas the trails in the Natural Bridge State Park are usually busy with tourists, the trails that weave through the RRG are rarely traveled, and afford plenty of quiet and solitude. Even a short hike in the gorge becomes something closer to an intriguing exploration of a forgotten landscape. In the last ten years the RRG has become very popular with rock climbers – who roam the planet dreaming of a place with only a small fraction of the amount of rock there. Two of America’s best climbers, David Hume and Katie Brown – both of them are teenagers – learned to and still climb at the Red River Gorge. Close to one thousand climbing routes have been established at the gorge, with potential for thousands more. That, of course, is the best part – there are so many hidden places and canyons in the gorge that first ascents will be a possibility long into the future.
When, 30 years ago, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed building two dams on the Red River, locals became outraged. The prospect of the Red River Gorge becoming another silt-clogged resevoir horrified them. The popular environmental writer and poet Wendell Berry defended the RRG as one of Kentucky’s precious few remaining wild places in a book called The Unforeseen Wilderness. Public concern for the gorge was so great that the Army Corps of Engineers abandoned their plans to make a lake out of the gorge –the only time that a congressionally approved proposal was not completed. All of us, including the Pileated Woodpecker, are fortunate.
So, from up on top of the gorge, listen one last time to the cry of the Pileated Woodpecker. Be careful – there are no guardrails or fences to protect you from the severe cliffs. Perhaps you’ll inch up to the edge, and dangle your feet over. Or perhaps you’d rather stay put far from the cliffs. Either way, the Red River Gorge commands respect.

*SOURCES*

Berry, Wendell. The Unforeseen Wilderness. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1991.

Caudill, Harry M. Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1962.

Caudill, Harry M. Theirs be the Power. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1983.

Caudill, Harry M. The Watches of the Night. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1976.

Elliot, Brook and Barbara. Hiking Kentucky: America’s Best Day Hiking. 1998.

Gerth, Joseph. Red River Gorge: Beauty and peril: Risky acts and alcohol lead to deaths in park, The Courier-Journal, Louisville, KY. Sunday Metro section, Page 1a. 4/18/99.

High, Ellesa Clay. Past Titan Rock. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984.

Jillson, Willard Rouse. The Geology and Mineral Resources of Kentucky. Frankfort: Kentucky Geological Survey, 1928.

Lexington and Eastern Railway, Passenger Department. Natural Bridge in the Kentucky Mountains. 1900

Mammoth Caves National Park website.

Ruchhoft, Robert H. Kentucky’s Land of the Arches. Cincinnati: Ducelle Press, 1986.

Sanders, Scott Russell. In Limestone Country. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.

Sonder, Leslie. Professor, Earth Sciences. Personal Interview, Dartmouth College, 11/99.

Ventura, Miguel. Personal Interview, Slade, Kentucky, 6/99.

Weisenfluh, Gerald et. al. Kentucky’s Coal Industry: Historical Trends and Future Opportunities. Lexington: Kentucky Geological Survey, 1998.