These hollows are patient water's work — creeks authoring a landscape grain by grain, a project still underway in every stream the road crosses. The hills take their name from the Hocking River, which carries a word far older than Ohio: Hockhocking, a Delaware-language name meaning 'bottle river,' for the bottle-shaped gorge near its headwaters, recorded by travelers as early as the 1760s. The Delaware, Shawnee, and Wyandot peoples lived and traveled this country, and their nations continue today. This segment joins the deep-time story of the land to the old word on the map — and, for northbound drivers, points the way to Rock House, the corridor cave waiting ahead.
There's a word that built this whole region's name, and it's a good one to learn on a winding road: Hockhocking. It comes from the language of the Delaware people, and it means bottle river. The Hocking River — the stream these hills take their name from — narrows and swells near its headwaters into the shape of a bottle: round body, tight neck. The people who knew this country best named the river for that shape, travelers were recording the word by the seventeen sixties, and a couple of centuries of mapmakers and settlers wore it down to Hocking. So the Hocking Hills are, properly, the hills of the bottle river — and the Delaware, the Shawnee, and the Wyandot peoples who named these waters are present in more than the words on the map: their nations continue today. Now put the deep time under the old word. The sandstone in these cliffs is a rock on the far side of three hundred and fifty million years — and then, ages upon ages later, patient creeks and floods of Ice Age meltwater carved it into the gorge country you're driving. No drama to it, just water and gravity with no deadline at all; give a creek enough seasons and it will out-work any machine ever built, quietly, a grain at a time. Every hollow this road swings through is a water project; every ridge is the leftover. The carving continues this minute in every creek you cross. And speaking of what water can do, your next stop is the strangest demonstration in the park. Rock House, coming up ahead, isn't another waterfall or another cliff face. It's a house made of cliff, windows included — a long corridor running through the inside of the rock wall, with great arched openings looking out over the gorge. People have been sheltering in it, hiding in it, and telling stories about it for a couple of hundred years, and the stone steps that take you down to it are a story all by themselves. I'll let the place tell you that one when you arrive. So there's your stretch of road, in three layers: an old word on the map, an unimaginably old rock underneath it, and just ahead, the one spot in these hills where you don't stand beneath the rock or beside it. You walk in.