Cumberland Plateau

Why should it be a National Park?

When you think of rock arches and natural bridges, most will inevitably picture the red rock sandstone formations of Utah in Arches National Park, but the Cumberland Plateau region of eastern Kentucky and Tennessee will broaden your view of where these rock formations can be found in the United States. It's a little piece of the southwest in the southeast. The plateau is a tableland of sandstone and shale features that contain one of the highest concentrations of rock arches anywhere in the world, and by far the most in the eastern United States.

The region stands 1,000 feet above the neighboring Tennessee Valley. The thick forests covering the Cumberland area and a natural labyrinth of canyons and river gorges that were carved over the last 500 million years have long concealed and preserved the stone features that define the region. This has made it easy for the landscape to hide its greatest secrets. There are hundreds of known and named arches, waterfalls, and other stone formations with new sites worth visiting being discovered all the time by hikers and backcountry adventurers.

The central factor that kept this area secret and undisturbed is location. The terrain was impassable until relatively recent in our history, therefore, highways and other major roads have largely bypassed the plateau in favor of easier routes. Even now it remains shockingly unknown despite its close proximity to the cities of Knoxville, Nashville, Louisville, and Lexington. By comparison, in 2016 only 684,715 people visited the natural wonders found on the Cumberland Plateau, while nearby Great Smoky Mountains National Park (2 hours southeast by car) received a record 11.3 million visitors.

The scale and beauty of the Cumberland Plateau is certainly deserving of greater visibility and annual visitation. However, the region's complex land management makes this difficult to achieve. In 1937, Cumberland National Forest was established (later renamed Daniel Boone National Forest) to protect wooded sections of the plateau within the state of Kentucky. Further conservation efforts led to the creation of the adjacent Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area in 1974 to extend the protections into northern Tennessee. Although the USFS and NPS manage these lands respectively, their dual-stewardship makes it difficult to combine their missions and create greater awareness and accessibility to the Cumberland Plateau.

National forests, while important, care for significantly more lands than the NPS and allow their acreage to be altered for a number of purposes, including resource extraction. Instead, National Parks are meant for interpretation and preservation. A comprehensive and assembled Cumberland Plateau National Park that highlights the breathtaking river gorges, rock cliffs, formations, and arches would put this rural section of the south on the map as a clear tourist destination and further protect the lands from exploitative practices.