Red River Gorge: A Sandstone Canyon the Developers Never Got

The Red River Gorge Geological Area, inside Daniel Boone National Forest in eastern Kentucky, is one of the most concentrated collections of natural stone arches in the eastern United States. The gorge itself was carved by the Red River cutting through a sandstone plateau over millions of years, leaving canyon walls, overhanging cliffs, and at least one hundred rock arches that have been catalogued by the Forest Service. The tallest, Sky Bridge, arches seventy-five feet high over a ravine accessible by a trail short enough that most visitors walk it in under an hour.

The gorge very nearly became a reservoir. In the nineteen sixties and seventies, the Army Corps of Engineers proposed a dam that would have flooded a significant portion of the canyon. The opposition to the dam brought together an unlikely coalition: the young environmental movement, rock climbers discovering the gorge as a destination, local landowners, and eventually figures including the poet Wendell Berry and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who led a hiking protest in nineteen sixty-seven. Congress permanently blocked the project when President Bill Clinton signed the Red River Designation Act in nineteen ninety-three, barring any dam on the river.

Daniel Boone National Forest takes its name from the frontiersman who passed through this corner of Kentucky in seventeen sixty-nine, becoming one of the first English-speaking explorers to see its interior. The Boone mythology that followed, the coonskin cap, the solitary woodsman, the tamer of wilderness, was largely a creation of later writers, particularly John Filson, who published an account in seventeen eighty-four that made Boone internationally famous. The actual Boone was primarily a land speculator, lost most of what he claimed, and died in Missouri in eighteen twenty, nearly broke.

The gorge he helped make famous was saved by people who came three hundred years after him.