Hocking Hills State Park

Hocking Hills — Caves, Cliffs & Waterfalls

38 stops· 1 hr 9 min· 28.4 mi

The flagship tour of Hocking Hills — six legendary stops strung along one winding scenic byway, driven at your pace with a walk at every one. Start at Cantwell Cliffs, the rugged corner most visitors miss, and squeeze down a crack in the rock the locals named a century ago. Stand inside Rock House, the only true cave in these hills — a corridor in the cliff with great arched windows where outlaws and bootleggers once kept house, so the story goes. Walk the hush of Conkle's Hollow, a boardwalk gorge beneath walls of two hundred feet, where pioneer legend says a robbers' treasure is still up on the ledge. Give the centerpiece its due at Old Man's Cave — waterfalls, the Devil's Bathtub, stone bridges raised by the CCC, and the great recess cave where the hermit Richard Rowe lived out his days with his dogs. Catch the biggest water in the hills at Cedar Falls — named by settlers who couldn't tell a hemlock from a cedar — and finish in the grandest stone room in Ohio: Ash Cave, a seven-hundred-foot amphitheater sheltering ten thousand years of human firelight, where Ranger Boone closes the day with the story of Grandma Gatewood, the sixty-seven-year-old Ohio grandmother who out-walked everyone who doubted her. Ranger Quinn guides; Boone stops you seven times for the deep stories. The park is free; the tour works fully offline — exactly what these no-signal hills require. Works in either direction, north or south. Good shoes recommended; every walk is under ninety minutes and one is fully wheelchair-accessible.