6-mile Indian Fort hike, Berea, KY - November 2022
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We returned to a place first introduced to me by my 7th grade Sunday school teacher, Whit Craik. He piled a bunch of his students into his 1968 Plymouth Barracuda “fastback” and took us to the hills of Indian Fort, part of 9,000 acres owned and managed by Berea College. He showed us a spring and drinking bowl carved out of a limestone ledge either by the Hopewell indigenous maybe 2,000 years ago or more recently by the Cherokee or Shawnee native to the region. It’s a hike filled with rewarding views (map & pics). From West Pinnacle you look back over the rolling fields of the Bluegrass and from East Pinnacle the view is into the beginnings of Appalachia. Berea College is tuition free and was founded in in 1855 as the first interracial and coeducational college in the South. After the hike we stopped in Berea for refreshments at the Frost Cafe adjacent to the historic Boone Tavern. Dinner was in Midway, a small restaurant and shop-filled Kentucky village with a railroad running down the middle of Main Street.
