Red River Gorge / Rock Bridge Trail
Driving from Hoosier National Forest, Indiana to Red River Gorge, Kentucky | Camping in Red River Gorge | Hiking the Rock Bridge Trail | May 2024
We woke up at our campsite in Buzzard Roost Recreation Area to a beautiful sunrise lighting up the sky…but unfortunately, it was rising too far North to be seen through the break in the trees at our scenic spot over the Ohio River. Oh well, we enjoyed what we could see, and got an early start to our morning. After breakfast and packing up, we hit the road to finish our drive in Indiana. The drive started out especially scenic, and we found that the tiny town of Magnet, IN was nothing like what we imagined — it was made up of nicer houses on the hill with big, wide overlooks of the river and Kentucky. I’m not sure how much a nice house with this view in rural Indiana would cost, but hey, we enjoyed the same view for $0 for one night!
After entering into Kentucky in Hawesville, we took US-60 East to Louisville, entering into a few more counties — Kentucky is a difficult state especially when we’re usually traveling Northwest to Southeast across it, but we’re slowly making progress. We had to take a break from driving around Frankfort so Curtis could take a work call. We stopped at Josephine Sculpture Park, which was free, dog friendly, and not too far off the interstate. Charlotte and I went on a short walk, then rested in the shade while Curtis had his meeting. Once that was over, we continued driving on I-64 East to Lexington. Here, we had a few urgent errands to run — mainly, we had some MOD Pizza points that were about to expire, and this was the closest we’d be to one of the restaurants for a while. While in civilization, we also picked up a cooling mat for Charlotte. She has been doing fine in the van when we run a couple fans, but we’re always looking for ways to make her comfortable both inside and outside. (Naturally, after buying this we headed into the mountains where it was considerably cooler for the rest of this trip!)
Once we had gotten everything we needed and our gas tank was full, we continued our drive East. Today we would be returning to a place we’d visited before that we knew had camping and plenty of great hikes: Red River Gorge! Seeing that the visitor center would be closed today, we stopped at a gas station to pick up a camping permit for the night, then made our way to Tunnel Ridge Road where we intended to camp. Last time we were here, we went for a more remote camping area because we knew this area would likely be more popular, but since we still had plenty of daylight left we wanted to check this place out.
The dispersed camping is interesting here — there are several pull outs along the gravel road that have parking areas that could fit maybe 4-5 cars, an outhouse, and trails that lead back to different clearings in the woods where you could set up a tent. I don’t know if each one is considered one campsite and what the etiquette is for sharing these small lots, but tonight wasn’t busy at all so we had one all to ourselves. The permit to camp here was only $5 for the night, though they are considering changing that — they’re conducting a user review/survey to gather people’s thoughts, so we submitted our opinions on how they could improve. Besides having the established parking spot and outhouse, we could also walk from our site to another small rest area overlooking the gorge (and if we had wanted, we could have walked longer to two other trailheads, one at each end of the road). We also had phone service here, which was a plus! Overall, we had a great night here, and enjoyed walking Charlotte down the road several times to enjoy the overlook.
The next morning, we packed up and got on the road early so that we could go for a hike. After reviewing the trails we hadn’t hiked yet, we decided that the Rock Bridge Trail would be the best option for us. The area was busier than we expected for a Wednesday morning, but we still found a place to park and started on the trail. The Rock Bridge Trail is a 1.6 mile loop hike that goes down into the gorge, follows a creek, and features a waterfall and small rock bridge, as the name suggests. We went about the loop counter-clockwise, which had a shorter and steeper descent and a more gradual elevation gain on the return.
We enjoyed descending into the gorge and seeing the rock walls towering over us, and found the waterfall (Creation Falls) to be more of a highlight than the rock bridge. However, the highlight for me was seeing some of my favorite higher elevation flowers in bloom: mountain laurels! They were a little past peak, but there were still some that looked fresh, bright white with pink accents, and had their perfect, fascinating shape. If you’re interested in the hike, you can see our AllTrails hike recording here.
Once we finished the hike, we had some lunch then said goodbye for now to this area — I’m sure we’ll find our way back to hike more of the trails! We then drove for 2 ½ hours South on Kentucky highways — it went about as well as we imagined, being long, winding, and with lots of ups and downs. But we got 4 new counties out of it, so it was worth it? We’re always blown away by how much forested land there is, and yet how there is nothing we can do because most of it is privately owned. Once we finally made it through, we went East on 25E, and returned to another park we had been wanting to revisit: Cumberland Gap National Historic Park!
