Rock House

The marked walk is about a mile and moderate. It dips into a wooded cove, then climbs stone steps to the cave's openings and back out. Rock House can blend into the cliff until you're close, so watch for the steps leading up instead of expecting a cave entrance at path level. The stone can be slippery when wet, and the climb out is steep enough that the short distance understates the effort.

The cavern feels more like a long stone room than a narrow passage. Walk through the windows and look back along the chamber: the columns divide the openings into separate frames, with patches of forest and daylight beyond them. The floor is uneven rock, so slow down where it gets slick and give yourself time to look around rather than rushing straight through.

Rock House is in Blackhand sandstone. Water working along a horizontal seam helped hollow the chamber, while intersecting cracks widened into its windows. The same layers that make long ledges along the cliff are visible inside the passage, where softer and harder bands weather at different rates.

Indigenous people used the cavern as shelter for thousands of years. Small recesses in the walls, later called hominy holes, are believed to have been used as baking ovens; troughs in the floor collected rainwater. They are easy to miss among the stripes and ledges in the sandstone, so look carefully without touching or altering them.

Rock House was a tourist destination long before the park was established. Around 1835, Levi Friend built the nearby Rock House Hotel; Colonel Rempel bought it in 1878. The 16-room hotel had a ballroom and a livery stable. Its main building is gone, though features and plants from the garden remain.

The shelter house on the former hotel site dates to 1934, when Civilian Conservation Corps Company 505 built it. Company 526, an African American CCC unit camped near Cantwell Cliffs, also worked in the area on shelters, trails, tree planting and fire response.

The picnic area has tables, grills and latrines, and a day-use shelter that can be reserved; when it is not reserved, it is first-come, first-served. Trails and picnic areas are open from half an hour before sunrise until half an hour after sunset. In winter, expect icy trail sections.

For a photo, stand inside one of the openings and include a stone column at the edge of the frame with trees beyond it. That bit of dark passage makes the cavern feel deeper than a straight shot out toward the bright forest.