Off to your left, where the gorge pinches in, Rock House Falls slides over a lip of the same Black Hand sandstone that hollowed out the Rock House itself. It's a seasonal falls — a real curtain of water after a hard rain or the spring thaw, and often just a silver thread by late summer — so what you get depends on the week you came. Either way, you're looking at the slow machinery that built this whole place: water finding the soft seams in the stone and working them open, grain by grain, over millions of years, until a cliff became a cave and a trickle became this gorge. Take a beat here — the falls, the cool air rising off the water, the hemlocks closing in overhead — before the trail carries you up to the Rock House.
Photo: Rhododendrites · CC BY-SA 4.0