Hocking Hills

Ohio had not, until this trip, occupied much space in my imagination. We were driving across it toward somewhere else when Lia, reading aloud from her phone, said there was a place an hour south of Columbus with gorges and caves and waterfalls, and did I want to detour. I did not, particularly. I’m glad she insisted. Because when you leave the car at Old Man’s Cave and start down the trail, the temperature drops, the light goes green and underwater, and you descend into a gorge so cool and hushed and dripping that the flat cornfields we’d driven through an hour earlier seemed like a lie. Southeastern Ohio hides this. I had no idea.

Old Man’s Cave

The signature walk is Old Man’s Cave, a gorge where the trail threads along the stream, over little stone bridges, behind waterfalls, and through a tunnel carved right into the rock. The cliffs here are Blackhand sandstone, soft enough that water has scooped great recessed hollows into them — “recess caves,” huge shallow overhangs where the rock arcs above you like the underside of a wave. Lia went ahead as always, and I found her standing under one of these overhangs with her palm flat against the cold, damp stone, ferns hanging from every crevice above her. Water dripped steadily off the lip and into the pool. Neither of us said anything for a while. Some places ask for quiet.

Ash Cave and the Falls

The next morning we walked to Ash Cave, and it stopped me flat — a vast horseshoe of an overhang, the largest recess cave in the state, curving seven hundred feet around a sandy floor, with a thin ribbon of waterfall dropping the full height of the cliff into a pool at its base. The scale of it is hard to hold in the eye. Lia stood at the bottom and I climbed to the rim to photograph her, and she looked tiny, a speck beneath all that stone. Earlier we’d done Cedar Falls, the biggest waterfall by volume in the region, roaring after overnight rain. My boots were soaked through. Worth every squelching step.

The Rim and the Dark Sky

For a different view we hiked out to Rock House, the only true cave in the park — a corridor tunneled through the cliff face with window-like openings looking out over the treetops. From up on the rim trails you get the whole picture: a rumpled green sea of hemlock and oak rolling away to the horizon, so different from the tabletop Ohio to the north. And at night — this is the thing nobody warns you about — the sky here is genuinely dark, one of the region’s draws, and we lay back on a picnic table and watched more stars than either of us had seen in months arc over the black outline of the hills. Lia found the Milky Way. I found her hand. We stayed out until the cold drove us in.

Getting There

Hocking Hills lies in southeastern Ohio, about an hour’s drive southeast of Columbus, which has the nearest major airport. There’s no public transport to speak of, so a car is essential — the trailheads at Old Man’s Cave, Ash Cave, Cedar Falls and Rock House are scattered across the state park and the roads between them are half the pleasure. Weekends and autumn draw big crowds to the popular gorges, so come on a weekday and start early if you want the trails to yourself. Bring boots you don’t mind soaking. The stone stays wet down there year-round.