“In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.”
Aristotle
Saturday, my wife and I met my oldest daughter and her husband for a day of hiking and adventure at Natural Bridge State Park and Red River Gorge.
I’d heard a lot about Red River Gorge from a friend of mine during my corporate days, but I hadn’t made the trip since moving to Kentucky because of building our house, the pandemic, etc. So, when my daughter said they were going to visit the area, I jumped at the ‘excuse’ to travel a couple of hours from home to visit a place I’d heard so many good things about.
I’ve seen a few natural arches before in New York (Watkins Glen – the first place I visited after college graduation), Natural Bridge in Virginia (where you can see graffiti from a young George Washington carved into the cliff face in the gorge), and one just a few miles from our home. But I never expected to see so many arches in one day in the eastern U.S. as we did on this trip.
Natural Bridge was awe-inspiring. It was also huge. Unless you have special camera equipment, you can’t take a picture of the whole arch unless you take it from a distant spot. There are several different ways to get to it:
- The easy way (also the scariest as you have to take an ancient chair lift up with a 100-foot drop under your feet most of the way)
- ‘The easiest and shortest way’ (at least the sign on the trail said it was, but you had to climb up the mountain for over a mile).
- And then there’s ‘the other way,’ which had hundreds of steps and was the most challenging (we didn’t take it as we went up the ‘easy’ way and came down the chair lift).
After lunch, we went to the Red River Gorge, which reminded me of a lush Mesa Verde without the pueblo dwellings. Cliff faces stuck out all over the place. We ‘only’ saw two of the approximately 100 arches in the national geological preserve, Skybridge Arch and Whistling Arch. Both are unique and fascinating and are short walks from a parking lot.
- Skybridge was unique because it is a large double-arch.
- Whistling Arch was interesting because it looked more like a giant hole in the cliff face than an arch.
Besides the area’s natural beauty, it was a day of firsts, as I alluded to in the title.
- First time I’ve been to those places.
- First time I’ve walked on top of an arch. Natural Bridge is so huge that it’s like a miniature highway on top. Skybridge – not so much. I’ve:
o Jumped out of airplanes, and helicopters (once without a chute into the top of a tree)
o Repelled down glaciers and cliff faces
o Climbed natural chimneys using only my legs and arms for support
o And climbed telephone poles with just gaffs (spikes) and a utility belt.
o But, as I’ve gotten older, I have a new ‘appreciation’ for heights (you could also call it fear). So, walking across arches with no railings or anything and a big drop-off on both sides wasn’t the most comfortable experience I’ve ever had.
- It was also the first time I’ve ever taken a chair lift at any place other than an amusement park. It took me a while before I started relaxing. We took the chair from the top of Natural Bridge down, so I was a little tense swaying a hundred feet above the ground in a rickety-looking chair. It was beautiful scenery, but I never worked up the courage to twist around and look behind me.
The picture below is of me underneath Skybridge Arch in the Red River Gorge Geological Area in Kentucky.
Kommentarer