Last Updated: September 3, 2026
Red River Gorge is in eastern Kentucky, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains about an hour east of Lexington. The gorge is a canyon system cut by the Red River through Daniel Boone National Forest, and it has more natural sandstone arches than anywhere else east of the Rocky Mountains. Hikers, rock climbers, kayakers and mountain bikers are attracted to the area throughout the year. We came in early spring, before the trees leafed out, which is the season when you can actually see the rock.
Red River Gorge
The gorge has the second most natural bridges and arches in the United States because of the sandstone geology, behind only Utah. Over a hundred of them are named, and the reason they are all concentrated here comes down to a single rock layer. The cliffs are Corbin Sandstone, laid down roughly 340 million years ago on a coastal river plain, and it is unusually hard, unusually thick, and sitting directly on softer rock that erodes out from underneath it. Water works into the vertical joints, weaker beds crumble away beneath the resistant cap, and what is left standing is an arch.
That is the same recipe that produced Mammoth Cave a couple of hours west of here — a hard sandstone caprock protecting softer rock below. There the water got underneath and hollowed out the longest cave system in the world. Here it worked from the outside and left the roof standing. One ingredient, two completely different landscapes, about a hundred miles apart.
There is also a distinction worth knowing, because the signs in the gorge use both words. A natural bridge was cut by a stream that once ran through the opening. A natural arch weathered out without any stream involved. Nearly everything here is technically an arch — Natural Bridge itself included.
At the nearby Whittleton Campground, we took the short trail to Henson’s Arch. It is a small sandstone arch in a cave with a seasonal waterfall next to it. Henson’s Cave Arch, to give it its full name, is formed by a pair of openings in the ground that meet at the bottom, so you drop into it rather than walking under it, and it stays cold and damp when everything above is dry. The whole walk is under a mile from the campground parking lot.
Shelters like this one are the reason the gorge is a National Archaeological District as well as a National Natural Landmark. The same caprock that makes the arches makes overhangs, and dry overhangs preserve things. The district covers 37,217 acres and 664 recorded sites, with human use going back more than 11,000 years — and rockshelters here produced some of the earliest evidence anywhere in the eastern United States that people were deliberately growing plants rather than only gathering them.
Nada Tunnel
The entrance to the gorge is the Nada Tunnel, a single lane road that’s 900 feet long. It was not built for cars. The Dana Lumber Company cut it between 1910 and 1911 to haul timber out of the Red River valley to a sawmill fifteen miles away at Clay City, blasting through solid sandstone with dynamite and steam drills, with crews working toward each other from both sides of the ridge. It was bored 12 feet by 12 feet. The clearance was raised to about 13 feet only after a loaded train wedged itself inside and had to be blasted free.
The name is the best part. Nada was the logging town down the road, and Nada is Dana spelled backwards — the company named the town after itself, in reverse. When the timber ran out the company left, the rails came up, and the tunnel became a dirt road for horses and walkers. It is now paved as part of Kentucky Route 77 and it is still exactly one lane wide, unlit, and wet from the rock.
We towed the Airstream through it. It clears — but there is no room for error, no lighting, and no way to pass, so traffic takes turns at the portals and you look through to make sure nobody is coming before you commit. Anything much taller or wider than a standard trailer should take the Mountain Parkway around instead.
We loved seeing all the different types of fungus on the trees, moss, and ferns. The gorge is a wet place — the sandstone holds water and releases it slowly down the cliff faces — and the shaded bases of the cliff lines stay cool and damp all year. That is why the plant list here reads oddly for Kentucky, with northern species hanging on in the cool pockets long after the climate around them warmed.
There were picturesque small churches and old homes along the way. We never got the name of the church — it came around a bend, we looked up, took the photograph and kept driving, which is how most of the good ones happen. The houses are worth a second look though, because they are older than the forest around them. Daniel Boone National Forest was assembled from private land starting in the 1930s, bought parcel by parcel from families who had farmed these hollows, and the roads through the gorge still run past homes, barns, farm bells and country churches that were here before any of it was federal.
That is the fourth time this month we have run into the same story. A thousand small farms in the Great Smoky Mountains. Farms, churches and cemeteries taken by eminent domain at Mammoth Cave. Eight hundred families moved and 270 cemeteries left behind at Land Between the Lakes. None of that makes these places less worth visiting. It just means somebody paid for them.
The Dam That Was Never Built
Red River Gorge came closer to disappearing than almost anywhere else we visited in Kentucky. After the Great Flood of Clay City in 1962, the Army Corps of Engineers proposed a flood control dam on the North Fork of the Red River. It would have worked, and it would have put a substantial part of the gorge under a reservoir — the arches near the river, the rockshelters, the whole bottom of the canyon.
What stopped it was not money. On November 18, 1967, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas — sixty-nine years old and a sitting member of the Court — walked a protest hike through what is now the Clifty Wilderness. He had done the same thing along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal a decade earlier and it had worked there too. The hike put the gorge on the national news, the Sierra Club and local opposition kept at it, and the project stalled and stalled until the Red River was finally written into the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System on December 3, 1993, which ended any possibility of a dam for good.
It is worth putting next to the others. Bourbon money bought Bernheim Forest and gave it away. A du Pont chemical fortune bought Cumberland Falls to stop a dam there. Rockefeller money bought a third of the Smokies. Red River Gorge is the version where nobody wrote a cheque and a sixty-nine-year-old judge went for a walk instead.
We found a spring waterfall. Most of the falls in the gorge are seasonal and run on rain rather than springs, which is why early spring — wet, cold and unglamorous — is when there is water coming off the cliffs at all.
Slade, Kentucky
Slade is the closest town with amenities, like this outhouse. Haha.
There were a few restaurants in Slade. The main ones were Thatcher BBQ, Miguel’s Pizza, or La Cabana Mexican Restaurant. All were usually packed. Thatcher’s and Miguel’s were very good, we never made it to La Cabana.
Miguel’s is a landmark rather than just a pizza place. Red River Gorge is one of the best sport climbing destinations in the world — the same pockets, huecos and overhangs that the chemistry of the Corbin Sandstone produced are what climbers come for — and Miguel’s has been the hub of that scene for decades, with a campground behind it and climbers from all over the world sitting outside eating pizza off paper plates. If the town seems busier than a town of its size should be, that is why.
A zebra swallowtail butterfly in very early spring. Temperatures were down to freezing at night and rarely up to 50 during the day. There were very few flowers let alone their favorite, pawpaw in bloom. Hardly survival conditions for a butterfly, but life is truly amazing. This butterfly was on the blue painted strip of an asphalt parking lot but makes for an unusual photo.
There is a reason it could be out that early. Zebra swallowtails overwinter as a chrysalis and the first brood emerges ahead of the season, which is why they turn up before there is much in bloom. The spring butterflies are a visibly different animal from the summer ones — smaller, paler, with shorter tails — and the two forms were once taken for separate species. The pawpaw connection is not just a preference either: the caterpillars eat nothing else, anywhere in the butterfly’s range, which is why zebra swallowtails are only ever found where pawpaw grows. Sitting on warm asphalt on a cold day is exactly what a cold-blooded insect should be doing, so the parking lot was better habitat that morning than the woods were.
Natural Bridge, Red River Gorge
The park was founded by the railroad. The Louisville and Nashville had been bringing tourists to Natural Bridge since the 1890s, acquired the land itself in 1910 when it bought out the Lexington and Eastern Railway, and in 1926 handed roughly 137 acres to the newly created Kentucky State Park Commission — making Natural Bridge one of Kentucky’s original four state parks. It has grown to about 2,300 acres, and roughly 1,200 of those have been a state nature preserve since 1981, protecting rare plants and the Virginia big-eared bats that were first recorded in Kentucky at this park in the 1950s. The arch itself spans 78 feet and stands 65 feet high, and there are more than 20 miles of trail and a lot of other sandstone besides.
The Natural Bridge Trail was wide and well marked. There is also a sky lift running from the park up toward the arch if you would rather not climb, which makes this one of the few arches in the gorge that almost anybody can get to.
Sky Bridge
A short walk with stunning views of the gorge leads to the bridge.
A short walk further to get below the bridge to see its full span. There are over 100 arches in Red River Gorge. Sky Bridge is one of the easiest to reach — the loop is under a mile, and it takes you over the top of the arch before dropping you underneath it, which is an unusual thing to be able to do.
Princess Arch
The arch trail is at the end of a long gravel road. We were hoping not many people would make the drive. The day we went there were a lot of other hikers, but it was still worth it.
There was either a heart… or butt cheeks in the rock, depending on how you choose to see it.
Whistling Arch
A short hike to a small arch on a ridge. It is one of the shortest walks to an arch anywhere in the gorge, a few hundred yards from the pull-off, which makes it a good one to add on at the end of a day when your legs are done.
Natural Bridge State Resort Park, Red River Gorge
From Lexington, Kentucky to Natural Bridge it was about a 2-hour drive. We stayed at Middle Fork Campground, one of the park’s two campgrounds — the other is Whittleton, where the Henson’s Arch trail starts. We had 50-amp service and good water pressure but no sewer. We went five nights without sewer, although we could have gone a few more nights if needed. This means we shower in the public restrooms, use paper plates to save on water and don’t cook pasta, which also requires a lot of water down the drain. It’s actually nice once in a while to shower in a large space where your elbows don’t hit the walls. The only drawback is that you have to wear flip flops in the shower. They didn’t have WIFI and there was no Verizon signal.
Our weather wasn’t the best, but we had a very nice creek that flowed through the campground.
It was still very early spring. A few wildflowers, including bloodroot, flax and apple trees were starting to bloom. Over half the days we were there it rained, and a couple of nights the temperatures dropped to freezing. The Red River Gorge is stunning. In a few weeks the hiking should be wonderful because the weather should be warmer, the trees leafed out, and there will be more wildflowers along the trails.
Visitor Information
Red River Gorge Geological Area is managed by the Cumberland Ranger District of Daniel Boone National Forest. Address: Daniel Boone National Forest Supervisor’s Office, 1700 Bypass Road, Winchester, KY 40391. Phone: 859-745-3100. Hours: The gorge is open year round, 24 hours a day. Fees: A recreation permit is now required to park in the gorge, at $5 per day, $7 for three days or $50 annually per vehicle, with a 50 percent discount for Interagency Senior and Access pass holders — this was not in place when we visited and it catches people out. Permits are sold at Forest Service offices, local vendors and through the Recreation.gov app, and there are fee envelopes on site. Overnight backcountry camping in the gorge also requires a displayed permit. Website: Daniel Boone National Forest — Red River Gorge.
Natural Bridge State Resort Park sits inside the same landscape but is run by Kentucky State Parks, not the Forest Service, and does not require the federal parking permit. Address: 2135 Natural Bridge Road, Slade, KY 40376. Phone: 606-663-2214. Admission: Free to enter; the sky lift and camping are charged separately. Camping: Middle Fork and Whittleton campgrounds, with electric and water hookups and no sewer at the sites; a dump station is provided. Website: Natural Bridge State Resort Park.
Nada Tunnel is on Kentucky Route 77 and is free and open to traffic, one lane, roughly 12 to 13 feet of clearance, unlit. Eating in Slade: Thatcher Barbecue Company at 918 Natural Bridge Road is open Thursday through Sunday and has since added a live music venue, The Pit House, at the same address. Miguel’s Pizza at 1890 Natural Bridge Road is still going and still full of climbers.
Practical Tips
Buy the parking permit before you need it. The recreation permit applies to vehicles parked along KY 15 and at trailheads throughout the gorge, and rangers do check. Buying it in advance saves you finding a vendor with a queue on a Saturday morning.
Think hard before towing through Nada Tunnel. We did it with the Airstream and it was fine, but it is one lane, unlit, wet, and about 900 feet long with no way to turn around. Look through before you enter, and if you are in anything tall or wide, take the Mountain Parkway around to Slade instead.
Come in early spring for the rock, later for the green. Before the leaves come out you can actually see the arches, the cliff lines and the shape of the canyon, and the seasonal waterfalls are running. The trade is cold nights, rain and very few wildflowers. By late spring it is warmer and greener and you can see much less.
Stay out of the rockshelters. They look like the obvious place to sit down or pitch a tent, and they are the single most fragile thing in the gorge — both archaeologically and botanically. The white-haired goldenrod, which grows in these shelters and nowhere else on earth, recovered well enough to come off the endangered species list in 2016 largely because trails and campsites were moved out of them.
Plan for no signal. There was no Verizon service and no WiFi at the campground, and coverage through the gorge is patchy at best. Download your maps before you arrive and tell people at home not to expect to hear from you.
Book Natural Bridge early. It is one of Kentucky’s most popular state parks and the two campgrounds are not large. If you are coming on a weekend in climbing season, reserve well ahead.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many natural arches are in Red River Gorge? More than 100 are named and mapped, and estimates run to about 150 including the smaller and less accessible ones. It is the largest concentration of natural arches east of the Rocky Mountains, and second in the United States only to Utah.
Can you drive an RV or tow a trailer through Nada Tunnel? We towed our 27-foot Airstream through without trouble, but the tunnel is a single unlit lane about 900 feet long with roughly 12 to 13 feet of clearance and no room to pass or turn around. Larger motorhomes and anything tall should approach Slade on the Mountain Parkway instead. Look all the way through before you enter, because oncoming traffic has to take turns.
Do you need a permit to visit Red River Gorge? Yes, for parking. A recreation permit is required for vehicles in the gorge — $5 per day, $7 for three days, or $50 annually — and a displayed permit is also required for overnight backcountry camping. Natural Bridge State Resort Park is separate and does not require it.
What is the difference between a natural bridge and a natural arch? A natural bridge was carved by a stream flowing through the opening. A natural arch formed by weathering alone, without a watercourse. Almost everything in Red River Gorge, including Natural Bridge itself, is technically an arch.
What is the easiest arch to reach in Red River Gorge? Whistling Arch is only a few hundred yards from the road. Sky Bridge is an easy loop of under a mile that takes you both over and under the arch. Natural Bridge is reachable on foot or by sky lift, which makes it the most accessible of the large ones.
When is the best time to visit Red River Gorge? Spring and fall. Early spring gives you bare trees, visible rock and running seasonal waterfalls, at the cost of cold nights and rain. Autumn gives you colour and settled weather but far more people. Summer is hot and humid and the views are closed in by leaves.
Is Red River Gorge good for rock climbing? It is one of the premier sport climbing destinations in the world. The Corbin Sandstone weathers into pockets and overhangs that make superb routes, and the climbing community centred on Miguel’s Pizza in Slade has been established here for decades.
Where should you stay when visiting Red River Gorge? Natural Bridge State Resort Park has a lodge and two campgrounds, Middle Fork and Whittleton, with electric and water but no sewer hookups. Slade has cabins and private campgrounds, and there is dispersed backcountry camping in the national forest with a permit.
From the gorge we turned west, back across Kentucky toward Corbin, Bowling Green and Hardin on our way out of the state and toward spring in the Rocky Mountains — that story is in Hardin, Bowling Green and Corbin, Kentucky.
