LouLife

If you were able to fly a plane due southeast from Louisville through the state — passing low over Taylorsville Lake, then Herrington Lake, then out of the Bluegrass Knobs and onto the Cumberland Plateau — you’d notice a steady rise in land elevation, from 500

The crest of Pine Mountain at the Bad Branch State Nature Preserve in Letcher County.

Like the Kunlun Mountains in Lost Horizon, the 120-mile-long crest — traversed by just five decently drivable roads between Jellico, Tenn., in the south and Breaks Interstate  Park in the north — separates parts of Bell, Harlan and Letcher counties from the rest of the commonwealth. On either side of it, swatches of the landscape have been distorted by strip and mountaintop-removal mining, but because of Pine Mountain’s unique geological makeup — thrust faulting 250 million years ago caused its sedimentary rock layers to point up at a 45-degree angle — long stretches of the mountain have been spared from surface mining, which needs horizontal coal seams for its equipment.

I’ve visited the far side of Pine Mountain twice in the last three years. The first time photographer John Nation and I came by way of I-75 and US 25E through Pineville (200 miles), site of the mountain’s only complete gap, cut by the Cumberland River. Then, from that southern entryway, we followed smooth and beautiful US 119 northeast 53 miles past Harlan to Kingdom Come State Park, situated 2,700 feet up on the ridge top outside Cumberland, Ky. (population 2,600, which makes it the metropolis of the mutually governed “Tri-Cities,” the others being the old coal-company towns of Benham and Lynch, which together add another 1,500 — and shrinking — citizens to the pot).

This trip we took I-64 to the Bert T. Combs Mountain Parkway, then exited onto KY 15 at Campton and left it for a succession of small state roads (7, 699, 463 and 160), the last of which took us over Pine Mountain into Cumberland.

Be forewarned: Aside from a Holiday Inn Express in Middleboro, 12 miles south of Pineville, and a Best Western in Harlan, you won’t find any chain lodgings on this side of the mountain, although there are one- and two-bedroom rustic cottages and a 30-room lodge at Pine Mountain State Resort Park outside Pineville. There’s also a locally owned motel in Cumberlandand a most interesting overnight spot in tiny Benham, once a thriving town founded and owned by a coal-mining and steelmaking subsidiary of International Harvester Co. The two-story Benham Bed & Breakfast is actually an adapted former elementary and middle school, with rows of green lockers and glazed brick walls along the corridors and a desk clerk in the principal’s office.

The rooms, while not elegant, are spiffily kept and roomy, with nice thick mattresses and bedspreads, hardwood or carpeted floors, and wonderful vintage furniture. The night we arrived we were told to be careful outside at dawn and dusk because black bears down from the mountain had gotten into the parking-lot dumpster a couple of hours earlier.

“We’ve had bear activity in the park for a good 15 years now,” says Kingdom Come park manager Rick Fuller. “We’ve had quite

The breathtaking Pine Mountain ridgeline runs from Breaks Interstate Park in the north to Jellico, Tenn., in the south.

Kingdom Come, the state’s highest state park, is raw and spectacular. It’s not a place for comfort-seekers — no lodge or cabins and just the smallest of camping areas. “We just have four sites,” says Fuller. “We don’t have water hookups or electric hookups. We don’t have shower facilities. It’s just strictly primitive camping. There’s very little flat land here and that’s one reason why we can’t have a big campground.”

What Kingdom Come does have is unparalleled views of both sides of Pine Mountain, along with pileated woodpeckers, elk, grouse, wild turkeys, hawks, osprey and, of course, the bears. “Spotting the bears is just a matter of being in the right place at the right time,” says Fuller. A massive sandstone outcropping in the middle of the park, called Raven Rock, looks out on the summit of Black Mountain (4,145 feet), Kentucky’s highest point. From up there, on a clear day, you can see the Great Smoky Mountains in the distance. Down there on the southeast side of Black Mountain is Virginia. Raven Rock itself, pitched at a 45-degree angle with about a 50,000-square-foot climbable surface, is a naturalist’s playground, its fissures sprouting several different shrub species.

Three Kingdom Come ridge-top overlooks provide stunning views of the Cumberland Plateau, cut into soft peaks by hundreds of creeks and rivers, with the Bluegrass region beyond. Up there you’ll find a paved section of the Little Shepherd Trail (KY 1679), a 38-mile, intermittently drivable road along Pine Mountain’s crest that runs from Harlan in the south to the US119 crossover near Whitesburg. The 12-mile section between Kingdom Come and US 119 is recently paved and provides continuous vistas and animal sightings.

Back at Pine Mountain State Resort Park— Kentucky’s oldest state park and home of the annual late-May Mountain Laurel Festival, which draws crowds of people from the region and beyond to celebrate the blooming of the proliferous shrub — communing with nature gets a little cushier. Just 12 miles north of “giant” Middlesboro (pop. 10,300) and Cumberland Gap National Historical Park, where most of the tourist traffic flows, the mountainside resort park offers golf, a big swimming pool and dining way beyond the scope of any restaurant along the backside of Pine Mountain. The distinctively charming lodge’s Mountain View Restaurant, which offers much better lunch and dinner fare than you’ll find elsewhere in the area, has an L-shaped picture window that looks out on the lofty Log Mountains to the south and the continuation of the PineMountainridgeline to the southwest.

Park naturalist Dean Henson says the forest canopy in preserved places along Pine Mountain— such as Blanton Forest, Lilley Cornett Woods and the park he’s called home for 13 years — includes 30 to 35 different trees, with many old-growth species more than 300 years old. The park, he says, “is one of Kentucky’s last great natural places.” Its trails, short but most involving elevation changes of 200 feet or more, take you deep among ancient hemlocks and lush rhododendron tunnels in two varieties — white and mountain rosebay. You’ll also see azaleas, partridgeberry, an early-blooming shrub with a spicy aroma called trailing arbutus and mountain laurel galore.

Bad Branch Falls marks the headwaters of the 700-mile-long Cumberland River.

On our first trip to Pine Mountain, we’d returned to Louisville via the US25E/I-75/I-64 route. This time we decided to take US 119 over the mountain to Whitesburg, then get on KY 15 and follow that to Campton, where we’d pick up the Combs Mountain Parkway to I-64. On the way to the base of the crossover, we spotted a little log-built roadside store called Oven Fork Mercantile & Bed and Breakfast and stopped to check it out. Owned by watercolor artist and craftsperson Barbara Church, whose ex-husband’s grandparents ran a grocery/gas station/post office there until 1988, it now holds everything from vintage bedspreads and wall hangings to kitchen utensils, old chairs whose seats Church recaned with hickory bark, honey made by her uncle and her own homemade fudge.

In the rear of the store, an adjoined area — actually, an adapted old log cabin she and friends had retrieved from three miles down the road 19 years ago — has three tiny bedrooms with rough-hewn bed frames and furniture and a small breakfast room. It also has the most amazing arrowhead collection I’ve ever scene, and that includes museums.

Down a little side road (KY 932) where the B&B cabin had its first life, on property since made a state nature preserve, we found the trailhead to Bad Branch Falls. A mile and a little more up the rhododendron-and-hemlock-lined trail we came to the base of a 70-foot waterfall in a 200-foot gorge — awesome in a visual sense but even more so in a hydro-geological sense. We were at the headwaters of the 700-mile-long Cumberland River, another of Kentucky’s major natural features, which empties into the Ohio River way across the state near Paducah. From higher on this piece of Pine Mountain, Bad Branch Creek cuts down to Poor Fork,

Standing there at the waterfall, pondering the enormity this little stream signified, I felt a shiver go through my bones.