In the months leading up to Christmas, we had asked the kids if they wanted to take a small trip somewhere. They expressed the desire to have more snow than we would get at home. We looked around for rental cabins within driving distance somewhere in the mountains. We ended up finding a neat and cozy two bedroom cabin in the Red River Gorge area of Kentucky.
Tanja and I had technically "been to" Kentucky once before in our quest to visit all 50 states, but all we did was eat lunch in Paducah in a small section where Interstate-24 crosses a small stretch of the state during one of our cross country road trips, so we had never spent any real time there and the kids had never been. We found a few pictures of the mountains and thought it looked really pretty.
The prospect of really visiting a new state and how much we liked the cabin was the deciding factor over somewhere like Pennsylvania where we didn't find any cool cabins or parts of the state that looked as interesting as Red River Gorge.
We planned on doing lots of hikes for exercise, fresh air, and to see the nature that the area is known for. Our first hike was to Natural Bridge (a large sandstone arch) with its own small hotel (they called it a resort) since it was a main draw in the area. There were log benches along the path near the hotel that made for fun photo spots.
This log shelter overlooks the gorge and the forest.
It was a nice quick hike to get to Natural Bridge. The arch is 65 feet high and over 75 feet long. The area was impressive and much more beautiful than I had imagined. The weather was also nearly 80 degrees despite it being late December!
We were able to climb up to the top of the bridge/arch.
Up at the top of Natural Bridge.
The view out across the gorge.
Some of the sections of the hike (or at least the path we chose) were very narrow.
In some spots, the sandstone had cool designs eroded or etched into it.
It was fun to walk along the small ledges but I had to watch my head so I didn't bump into the rock overhangs.
We also went to Nada Tunnel (pronounced nay-duh by the locals rather than the Spanish pronunciation of the word for "nothing"), a small narrow 900-foot tunnel blasted and excavated by hand and steam tools through the mountain in 1910 for logging. Now, it is a one-lane tunnel (and barely wide enough for that, it was a little unnerving to drive through it) for cars. Local legend holds that it is haunted by the ghost of a construction worker who was trying to thaw a stick of dynamite by a fire and managed to blow himself up, but we didn't see any paranormal activity. The tunnel is behind Derek here.
The next day we continued hiking around the area and went to the Sky Bridge area.
We saw more cool rock formations.
We made it to Sky Bridge, another towering arch.
It had a secondary smaller arch that made for a good photo spot.
We kept walking along the ridge at the Sky Bridge area.
There is a chair lift that operates in the summer which had a nice view out over the valley.
Our next hike went to Angel Windows, a side by side pair of small arches.
Our last Kentucky hike was to Whistling Arch. I believe it is named because wind blowing through the small opening might make something like a whistling noise if it hits right.
There were a few other hikes we wanted to take, but the Red River Gorge State Park rangers (or other authorities) closed many of the roads in winter so we couldn't make it to the trailheads. That was disappointing because it was a really cool area, but we got a good taste of it with the hikes that we did take.
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