Red River Gorge's Double Arch - where's the second arch?

After leaving Lexington, Kentucky, we headed southeast down the Mountain Parkway into the Daniel Boone National Forest. We are now on the eastern edge of the Appalachian Mountains. We have experienced some winding mountain roads when we visited some naturally beautiful parts of other states, so we were a little worried about the roads to get to our destination this day. But Kentucky provides a four-lane smooth highway that connects its cities to some of the best hiking trails in the country. After an easier-than-expected-62-mile-drive, we pulled into our camp site at Natural Bridge State Resort Park. We have some rain in our forecast, so we decided to take advantage of this blue-sky traveling day and get on the trails as soon as we got the motor home set up. 

We are hiking in the Red River Gorge this afternoon, a federal recreation area operated by the U.S. Forest Service. To get to the trail head it was an 11-mile drive (that took 25 minutes) from the state park where the motor home is parked. But this Double Arch Trail gets very good reviews.

Denisa is excited to see that some of the mountain laurel is still blooming on the trail. We've only seen this flowering bush in the eastern United States, and we haven't traveled in this part of the country since 2017. It's good to see this is old friend again.

Denisa also took pictures of this new friend that we don't remember seeing before.

This evening we started on the Auxier Ridge Trail. After hiking in the woods for a while, it's always fun to come out on a tall ridge to see the mountain tops around us.

Sometimes Denisa is on one of the mountain ridges, while Mark is taking pictures from another ridge. You can barely see her in the middle of the picture below.

We feel like we have wandered into more of God's wonders when we find big rock walls that are sculpted into wave-like patterns.

Today we also ran across this new-to-us lizard that blended into the color of the tree quite nicely with his ordinary bark-colored scales.

But when we saw him from the side, we realized his coloring was anything but ordinary. This male lizard was doing push-ups so he could show off his shiny blue belly.

The scales underneath were a shimmering iridescent blue to attract the ladies. We'll count that extraordinary coloring as another of God's wonders!

While we stood admiring that lizard, this doe walked into the sunlight and across the trail in front of us.

We finally got our first look of Courthouse Rock from one of our ridge-views. This is a loop hike, and that's one of the trail highlights we've been watching for.

We'll give this hike a good review in the All-Trails app because it has lots of diversity. It takes you high for ridge views, then down to the bottom of the valley to walk beside a bubbling stream.

The U.S. Forest Service needs to do a little trail maintenance, as we had to cross through fallen trees over the trail more than once.

But the trail finally led us to our destination--Double Arch.

The arch makes a great picture frame, with the blue sky and the green mountains as the background.

We started looking for the second arch, as we knew the name of this destination is "Double Arch." So there has to be another arch around here somewhere?!? Then Mark climbed up the side of the rock wall, and figured it out. All this time we had been standing underneath two arches. From his vantage point, Mark could see daylight between the two arches.

While he scrambled part-way up the wall to discover the double arch, Mark just kept going to the top. He's hard to see among the bushes on top of the arch, but Denisa took his picture from below.

After we left the arch, we headed in a new direction to complete this loop trail. From this viewpoint we could look across all those tree tops to see the ridge we had been on earlier. Everything is so green in Kentucky, and we're guessing that these trees are going to be lovely this fall.

Besides finding flowers and lizards, we also found that this trail will soon be delicious. Denisa spotted lots of blueberries . . .

and raspberries that will make yummy trail snacks in a few weeks when they ripen.

We were around two miles from the end of our hike, when we stopped to talk to a couple coming from the other direction. Mark had his downloaded version of All-trails running, so he knew exactly how far we had hiked and where the parking lot was. They did not. They were lost, and needed help finding their car. So they hiked the last couple miles with us. They kept calling us "trail angels" because we saved them from having to hike the entire loop backwards again to find their vehicle. We were glad to help, because after 6.9 miles with over 1,000 feet in elevation gain we were tired. With all their back-tracking, they had stretched this hike to over eleven miles so they were even more tired. It was fun finding Double Arch the first time, but we're guessing that it wouldn't have been as pretty hiking back by it a second time to find their car!