The forest you walk through is not what was here. The hemlock canopy is a remnant of a vastly larger Ice Age forest. Old-growth survives in a few tiny pockets. Understanding what's been lost changes what's left.
When you walk the Grandma Gatewood Trail from Old Man's Cave to Cedar Falls, you pass through mature hardwood forest that feels ancient. The hemlocks towering overhead look like they've been there forever. The oaks and hickories feel like first-growth. The moss and ferns and understory plants feel primeval.
Almost none of this is true. The forest you're walking through is second-growth — regrown, over the past 120 years, from land that was essentially clear-cut during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The hemlocks look mature but they aren't old by hemlock standards. True old-growth forest survives in only a handful of small, protected pockets. Most of what you see is recovery.
This is a piece of environmental history that changes how you look at the landscape once you know it. Understanding what Hocking Hills used to be — and what's been lost — makes the recovering forest more interesting, not less.
Start 15,000 years ago. North America was in the tail end of the Wisconsin Glaciation, the most recent ice age. The Laurentide Ice Sheet had advanced south through most of Ohio, stopping just north of what is now Hocking County. The region sat at the glacier's southern edge — cold, wet, dominated by boreal species that would now feel out of place this far south.
As the climate warmed and the ice retreated, the boreal forest withdrew northward. Warmer-adapted deciduous species — oak, hickory, maple, beech — spread north from southern refugia and established the current eastern hardwood forest. But not everywhere. The steep, north-facing, shaded gorges of Hocking Hills maintained microclimates that stayed cool and moist enough to support the boreal holdovers. Eastern hemlock, yellow birch, Canada yew, hay-scented fern, sharp-lobed hepatica — species typical of forests hundreds of miles to the north — persisted in the gorges.
This is why the gorge bottoms feel different from the ridges above them. You're not just descending into a cooler microclimate. You're descending into a genetically different forest — a small remnant of the Pleistocene ecosystem that once covered the region. The hemlocks above Cedar Falls are descendants of trees that were here when mastodons were.
This relict character is the single most unusual ecological feature of Hocking Hills. Most Ohio forests are straightforward temperate deciduous. Hocking Hills has a temperate deciduous forest on the ridges and a relict boreal forest at the base of the cliffs, compressed into a few hundred feet of vertical distance.
When European settlers reached southeast Ohio in the late 1700s and early 1800s, the region was covered in mature hardwood forest with a well-developed old-growth character. Oaks five feet in diameter. Chestnuts (before the blight) that rivaled the oaks. American beech, sugar maple, yellow-poplar, black cherry. The gorge ecosystems held the Ice Age hemlock-yellow birch communities intact.
The forest had been shaped, but not radically altered, by centuries of indigenous management. The Shawnee and earlier cultures — Adena, Hopewell — had used controlled burns to maintain oak-hickory habitat favorable to game animals. Hunting and gathering kept certain species populations in balance. Some clearings existed for seasonal settlements. But the forest was mostly intact.
Records from early settlers describe travel through the region as difficult specifically because of the density and size of the trees. The hardwoods were so large that felling them required days per tree. The understory was so shaded and thin that visibility was sometimes longer than in the modern forest, which has more light-admitting gaps.
Everything changed in the mid-1800s. Two forces drove the near-total deforestation of southeast Ohio:
Iron smelting. The region sat on iron-ore-bearing sandstone and had abundant hardwood forest. The combination was economically irresistible. Iron furnaces were built throughout the Hocking Valley — including Hope Furnace in what is now Lake Hope State Park in neighboring Vinton County. Smelting required enormous quantities of charcoal, and charcoal required hardwood. Production ran 24 hours a day for months at a stretch. The scale of the wood demand was staggering: historical records suggest a single working furnace could consume an acre of mature hardwood per day for charcoal alone.
At peak production in the mid-1800s, Ohio was one of the nation's leading iron producers. By the 1860s, much of the surrounding hillsides had been completely stripped of their timber. Photos from the era show what look like moonscapes — rolling hills with almost no standing trees, crossed by charcoal-making pits and logging roads.
Agricultural clearance. Simultaneously, settlers cleared forest for farms and pasture. The steep terrain of Hocking County wasn't well-suited to large-scale agriculture, but subsistence farming cleared significant acreage nonetheless. Much of what became farmland in the 19th century was later abandoned when the farming proved uneconomic — and that abandoned land eventually regrew into the forest you see today.
By the 1880s-1890s, southeast Ohio's forest had been reduced by well over 90% from its pre-settlement extent. What remained was fragmented, degraded, and actively being worked. The ecological damage was severe: massive erosion of the sandstone soils, loss of species dependent on old-growth habitat, collapse of wildlife populations. The iron industry eventually collapsed as easier-to-mine ore deposits were developed in Michigan and Minnesota. Ohio's iron boom ended almost as fast as it started, leaving the region economically devastated and ecologically wrecked.
The recovery began almost accidentally. When the iron industry left, the hillsides were worthless for the purposes they'd been cleared for. Abandoned farms reverted. The state began acquiring land for forestry and recreation purposes in the early 1900s. Hocking State Forest was established in 1924. The original tract that became Hocking Hills State Park was acquired shortly after.
The most dramatic recovery work happened during the 1930s, when the Civilian Conservation Corps planted trees on a massive scale across southeast Ohio. The giant hemlocks and pines lining Route 374 today — the trees that make the Hocking Hills Scenic Byway feel like driving through a corridor — were planted by CCC workers in the 1930s. Across the broader region, CCC and subsequent state forestry planting re-established canopy on land that had been bare for decades.
The forest that returned isn't identical to what was here before. A few key differences:
Chestnut is gone. The American chestnut, once a dominant canopy species in eastern hardwood forests, was functionally wiped out by chestnut blight between 1900 and 1940. It used to be an enormous percentage of the pre-settlement forest. Its disappearance is one of the great ecological losses of the 20th century, and you can still see evidence of it today — occasional chestnut stump sprouts that regrow for a few years before succumbing to blight again.
The hemlocks have a new threat. Hemlock woolly adelgid, an invasive insect, has been spreading through eastern hemlock populations for decades. It has devastated hemlock forests in the southern Appalachians and is now present in Hocking Hills. ODNR and the Hocking Hills Nature Center run active treatment programs, but the long-term trajectory for the region's hemlocks is uncertain. If the adelgid does to Hocking Hills what it did to the Smokies, the gorges will look dramatically different in 30 years.
The age structure is wrong. True old-growth forest has a distribution of tree ages, from saplings to centuries-old giants, that the recovering second-growth forest hasn't had time to develop. Most of the trees you see are 80-120 years old. Very few are 200+ years old. The ecological functions that depend on genuine old-growth structure — certain understory plant communities, certain cavity-nesting species, certain soil fungal communities — are still rebuilding.
Certain species haven't come back. Pre-settlement Ohio had elk, bison, cougar, wolf, and black bear populations. Most were extirpated from the state by the late 1800s. Black bears have recently reestablished small populations in southeast Ohio — Hocking County has occasional bear sightings. The rest are effectively gone. The forest that looks wild is missing most of its megafauna.
A small amount of true old-growth forest persists in Hocking Hills, mostly in places too rugged or protected to have been logged commercially. The most significant old-growth remnants are in the cliff-edge hemlock stands in the deepest, most inaccessible sections of the gorges — particularly along stretches of the Conkle's Hollow Gorge Trail and certain portions of Old Man's Creek. Some of the hemlocks in these protected microhabitats are genuinely 300-400 years old.
Big Spring Hollow, in the Hocking State Forest, holds some of the oldest known trees in the region but requires a permit for access. The Boch Hollow State Nature Preserve has a small old-growth component in a remote section of the property. These are not well-publicized because they're fragile and their species assemblages can't handle heavy foot traffic.
If you want to see the closest thing to old-growth that's accessible on a standard Hocking Hills visit: the cliff-edge hemlocks at Conkle's Hollow, especially along the gorge trail near the end of the accessible section. The trees aren't certified old-growth, but the microhabitat is largely undisturbed and the hemlocks are among the oldest in the publicly accessible park system.
Most visitors to Hocking Hills assume they're looking at ancient forest. Understanding that you're looking at a 120-year recovery on post-industrial wasteland changes the experience without diminishing it. The recovery is itself remarkable. Ecosystems rebuild. Forests return when given time and protection. The hemlocks have come back, the understory has largely restored itself, the streams have cleared.
But the recovery is fragile. Hemlock woolly adelgid could strip the gorges of their signature species within decades. Climate change is already shifting the range limits of the boreal holdovers — yellow birch and Canada yew are being pushed north and could disappear from southeast Ohio in the next century. The forest you see is not permanent. It's the current state of a long, contingent, still-in-progress recovery.
Which is its own kind of beautiful. Most visitors assume the forest is stable. The more honest frame is that it's been changing dramatically for 200 years, and it'll keep changing. You're walking through a snapshot of a system in flux. Pay attention to the hemlocks while they're here.