I've taken a little break from blogging about our trip up to UP of Michigan and back. Now it's time to get back at it.
After our first day in West Virginia, we spent our second day in the beautiful and distinctive Hocking Hills State Park in southeastern Ohio. As with most of the places on our journey, we had never been to this park and only knew it from other people's photos. The park is filled with cliffs, gorges, caves, and unique rock formations formed by water carving out the Blackhand Sandstone. Of course, when you have water flowing through rock formations you get waterfalls and this park has them, or at least the potential for them.
Like much of the Eastern US, southeastern Ohio has had a dry spell, which resulted in the waterfalls we looked forward to seeing being little more than trickles. If you do a
Google search for Hocking Hills images you will see some of what those waterfalls can look like when there is plenty of water flowing.
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| Cedar Falls |
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| Low Water Means Dry Feet |
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| Cedar Falls / Trickle |
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| Low Water Means Reflections |
What we did find were cool rock formations, grottos, cliffs, and caves.
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| Ash Cave |
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| Bridge Near Old Man's Cave |
We had to use our imaginations when looking at the dry river beds. There were several cool stone bridges and walls that would look great with water flowing by.
One of the most popular areas of the park is the Old Man's Cave, where a hermit named Richard Rowe once lived in the 19th century. Before settling in the Hocking Hills area, the Rowe family had their home in the East Tennessee. Around 1810 he traveled the Scioto and Ohio rivers and after watching closely all the happenings of the 1812 War he became a loner and chose to live a solitary existence in the forest.
Richard often took trips to the gorge in the fall and stayed there throughout the winter trapping season. One day he stopped at a stream for water like he always did. As was usual, Richard used his musket’s butt to crack the ice when the weapon fired and hit him under the chin. The legend is he was found two days later by trappers who buried him in the forest. To this day, no one knows the exact space where Richards was buried in the Old Man’s Cave.
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| More Leaves Than Water Near Old Man's Cave |
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| Stone Bridge |
Another popular spot in the park is a cave called Rock House. The Blackhand sandstone cave has a ceiling 25 feet high while the main corridor is 200 feet long and 20 to 30 feet wide. Water leaking through a crack in the cliff face caused the hollowing of the corridor. Nature has hewn out of this cliff the Rock House complete with seven Gothic-arched windows and great sandstone columns which support its massive roof. We were lucky to have the cave to ourselves while we made several photos. Photographing inside the dark cave with its multiple bright openings required taking several different exposures which I blended together once we got back home.
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| Rock House |
As a landscape photographer, I don't always get to photograph what I came for. There is always something of interest if we just toss out our expectations, look around, and photograph the interesting things that are all around us.
We've put Hocking Hills back on our Bucket List to do in the spring when wildflowers are blooming, the rains fill the creeks, and water flows over the falls.
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