Hiking the Old Man's Gorge at Hocking Hills State Park

[canyonwalker]

Ohio Waterfalls Travelog #6
Hocking Hills State Park · Fri, 17 Apr 2026. 12:15pm

After five blogs so far about this trip you might be wondering, "You said this was all about waterfalls. When are you actually going to get to one?" Well, it's been five blogs getting to this point because, as I often point out about traveling, getting there is half the trip. And now that we're here, five blogs later, so are the waterfalls. Start with this one:



This is Upper Falls at Hocking Hills State Park. It's in a gorge that is not well named on maps so I'm just going to call it Old Man's Gorge because all the signs talk about Old Man's Cave. Legends have it that an old man used to live in this area (actually there are two groups of legends, which describe two different old men but wind up converging on details post mortem) and buried treasure in a cave in this gorge. Hence Old Man's Cave. And thus Old Man's Gorge. IDK.

The gorge is pretty easy to get down into. I mean, it's a state park. There's a trail. 🤣 The bridge you see above the falls crosses over the creek near the rim of the gorge. Stairs of stone and wood lead down to the creek level. From here a trail runs a few miles through the gorge.



It's a pleasant walk along the trail at the bottom of the creek. This is one of the few pictures I got without anybody standing in front of me. While the park isn't crowded today it's also not empty. I'm glad we're here on a weekday. Tomorrow (Saturday) it will probably be thronged. Yay, retirement!

The walls of the gorge are sandstone. This particular layer is called Black Hand sandstone, named for a native people who lived here. The force of the water in the creek carved down vertically through the soft stone. The ridges and scallops you see in the stone are places where thin veins of harder minerals resisted the erosive action of water.

BTW, while this picture makes the gorge look like it's only 30' deep, it's actually more than twice that. The gorge walls here are stepped. There's at least one more riser of walls above them.



Further on down the gorge we noticed this small falls cascading down the walls along the route of a side creek. I've double checked the maps and can't find a name for it. Thus I'm going to go with Unnamed Falls.

The bridge you can see above the falls is a shortcut down from the visitors center. Apparently it's a shortcut for people who don't want to see Upper Falls (the first photo, above) which IMHO is the best part of this hike so far. Though it's premature of me to say that because there's still more to come.

Comments

[sorcyress]

Oh _wow_ the green trees and blue sky in that second one are _impeccable_. I wish I was the kind of artist who could be all "I want to do colour studies on that" and actually mean it, I will have to just appreciate how lovely they are!

~Sor

[canyonwalker]

Thanks, and I'm already doing color studies when I post pictures like these. I have a few techniques I apply in Photoshop to fix tonal range, contrast, color balance, and saturation. It's not that I'm looking to create an effect, though. I'm generally only compensating for the limits of what a camera is able to capture (and a screen is able to convey) versus what my eye could see when I was there.