The leaves are changing, temps are dropping, and the best views are past the trailhead. Take a weekday off, skip the Saturday crowds, and see autumn on your own terms.
Unfold your next Appalachian adventure with FREE SHIPPING on laminated maps. Use code FREEFALL at checkout. Offer ends on Black Friday so you can spend the day on ridgetops, not online.
As summer heat peaks, we’re taking a closer look at two massive structural features that shaped eastern Kentucky’s landscape: Cave Run Dam and Laurel River Dam.
Both Cave Run and Laurel River Dams sit within the Daniel Boone National Forest, carving out some of the clearest waters, super scenic trail networks, and best fishing in the region. Check out Kentucky From Above Explorer for bird’s eye views of the beaches, dams, and lakes.
Cave Run Dam
Built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and completed in 1974, Cave Run Dam tames the Licking River. The resulting 8,270 acre reservoir, Cave Run Lake, is framed by rolling hills and limestone bluffs.
Campgrounds and Beaches
Nearby Trails
Laurel River Dam
Also completed in 1974, the Laurel River Dam stands 282 feet high, impounding a steep-sided gorge to create the 5,600-acre Laurel River Lake. Because the shoreline is mostly undeveloped federal forestland, it contains some of the clearest, deepest waters in Kentucky.
Campgrounds & Beaches
Nearby Trails
Peak camping season is officially here, and to help you plan your nights under the stars, we’ve mapped out key celestial events for the remainder of 2026. Below, you’ll find the perfect intersection of astronomical timing and trail-tested recommendations for your next overnight adventure. As always, bring a headlamp, carry your map, stay mindful of cliffs, and check the weather for clear skies before heading out.
| March 20: Spring Equinox |
| At the Spring Equinox, the sun rises and sets almost exactly due east and west. |
| Trail: Sky Bridge in the Red River Gorge |
| Camping: Koomer Ridge Campground |
| April 22: Lyrid Meteor Shower |
| The Lyrids are famous for bright “fireballs.” The moon will be a waxing crescent and set early, leaving a dark window for viewing. |
| Trail: Auxier Ridge in the Red River Gorge |
| Camping: Dispersed backcountry camping near Pants Grip Point. Make sure to follow all park regulations. |
| May 31: Blue Moon |
| Since May starts and ends with a full moon, the Blue Moon is your best chance for a classic moonlit sandstone hike. |
| Trail: Rough Trail in the Red River Gorge |
| June 15: Peak Milky Way |
| Mid-June offers the longest window to see the galactic center with the new moon. |
| Trail: Honey Creek Loop in the Big South Fork NRRA |
| Camping: Picket State Park Campground is in an official “International Dark Sky Park.” |
| July 29–30: Delta Aquariid Meteor Shower |
| The Southern Delta Aquariid Meteor shower will produce a steady of dozens of faint meteors each hour under dark skies. |
| Trail: Rock Bridge Trail in the Red River Gorge |
| Camping: Dispersed camping near Rock Bridge Recreation Area |
| August 11–13: Perseid Meteor Shower |
| This is the gold standard of meteor showers, producing 30–50 meteors per hour. 2026 is a perfect year because of a New Moon, so the sky will be as dark as possible. |
| Trail: Yahoo Falls in the Big South Fork NRRA |
| Camping: Alum Ford Campground |
| September 25–27: Harvest Moon |
| The Harvest Moon stays bright for several nights in a row, traditionally helping “hunters” navigate the woods, and it’s great for night hiking. |
| Trail: Ridge Trail to Pinnacle Overlook in the Cumberland Gap NHP |
| Camping: Gibson Gap Backcountry Campsite |
| October 21–22: Orionid Meteor Shower |
| These meteors are fragments of Halley’s Comet. They are known for being fast and leaving glowing “trains.” |
| Trail: Hensley Settlement in the Cumberland Gap NHP |
| Camping: Martins Fork Backcountry Campsite |
| November 16–17: Leonid Meteor Shower |
| Historically famous for meteor storms, the Leonids usually produce fast bright meteors with occasional fireballs. |
| Trail: John Muir Trail toward Laurel Fork Creek in the Big South Fork NRRA |
| Camping: Station Camp Campground |
| December 13–14: Geminid Meteor Shower |
| The Geminids are one of the most spectacular meteor showers can produce over 100 meteors per hour from debris of asteroid 3200 Phaethon. |
| Trail: Sheltowee Trace north of Cave Run Lake |
| Camping: Clear Creek Campground |
Another year stretches ahead, and with it, another chance to explore Appalachia. The trails shift dramatically with each season, offering new reasons to lace up your boots throughout the year. Spring wildflowers emerge from forest floors. Summer brings waterfalls at their coolest. Fall delivers brilliant reds and golds stretching between overlooks. Winter strips everything down to rock and sky, opening up expansive views.
The best adventures aren’t random; they’re timed. Catching peak wildflower bloom. Hitting the trail before summer crowds. Standing at cliff’s edge when fall color is at its peak. These are the moments that become your stories. Make 2026 a year of those moments. Pick your trails, mark your calendar, and hike out when the seasons deliver.
Our favorite hikes from 2025? Spring trails in the Red where mountain laurel blooms surrounded the trails, cool weather held, and sunshine lit up the forest. Those days reminded us what exists beyond the everyday—wilderness that pulls you out of your routine and shows you raw, natural beauty. We can’t wait to see it again in 2026.
Here’s to another year of memories on the trail. Happy New Year!
Skip the gift cards this season and gift the hikers, climbers, and explorers on your list something they’ll actually use…again and again. Check out our Winter Sale map deals and give the spirit of real adventure. Because the best gifts aren’t just opened—they’re experienced.
Coupons and offers cannot be applied to prior purchases. Valid on or before 11:59 EST Decebmer 31, 2025. TEE30 valid on up to two tees. Free Cumberland Gap map is not laminated. Other exclusions may apply.
Our Red River Gorge Trail Tee is the ultimate conversation starter and functional wearable. We brought it back by popular demand so you can now get the shirt that fellow hikers have literally tried to buy right off our backs.
This is the perfect gift for adventurers, climbers, or anyone who’s tried to explain why you’d drive for hours just to walk in the woods. Currently available in very limited quantities!
KyFromAbove released Phase 3 aerial photography, including oblique imagery, in Spring 2025. The images are available to download and are open data. However, finding the right set of images to download might be a task.
This viewer allows you to zoom in and see the available images for each exposure point, which takes 5 images: one nadir and four at cardinal directions. With 885,789 exposures, that’s over 4.4 million images, which range between 40 MB and 100 MB at roughly 10k x 15k pixels per image.
You can interactively search and download them through this website:
boydx.github.io/phase-3-oblique-centroids
You can interactively
The oblique images are hosted as TIFFs on a KyFromAbove AWS S3 bucket and can be previewed on mobile devices using modern browsers.
Below are some screenshots of the viewer and oblique images.
Can we detect changes in surface height over time, at a neighborhood scale? The changes in heights represent the loss and growth of trees, buildings, and other features of the built environment.
KyFromAbove has multiple phases of lidar point clouds for Kentucky as open data. In this interactive map of Lexington, Kentucky (inside New Circle), we demonstrate how to visualize and explore these changes in surface height between 2010 (Phase 1) and 2019 (Phase 2) lidar point clouds.
While most point clouds are colorized by aerial photography to give a realistic view of the surface, this project uses a different approach. Points are colorized by the amount of change in surface height between the two phases. The color scale is from red (decrease in height) to blue (increase in height). Both phases are shown simultaneously with the ability to toggle the visibility of each phase.
View the interactive Potree scene viewer (which is VR-enabled) through this website:
Below are some screenshots of the viewer focused on Kentucky Proud Park at the University of Kentucky campus.
KyFromAbove has three phases of collecting high-resolution aerial imagery and elevation data. Over the last few weeks, we have made a four browser apps with MapLibre GL JS, Leaflet, and Esri JavaScript APIs that allow users to visualize and interact with the data from each phase. This page provides links to the apps:
When you encounter a trail navigation sign, you understand left, right, and forward. But, does down mean back? This eight-year-old said yes and quizzed me on it at Berea Fort Mountain.
The Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky has a new portal for information relevant to our mapping and GIS activities. It’s still in development but I thought that I’d share the site: https://gis.uky.edu
How many times have you taken a photo with your phone of a trailhead kiosk map? Inside the mailbox were neatly folded paper maps made by the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife.
We might be in peak mountain laurel bloom this May. We visited mile marker 77 on the Sheltowee Trace and found a riotous scene of white and pink flowers.
Interactive web maps have come a long way over the years. First we had slippy maps using raster tilesets – they’ve been around for about twenty years and are incredibly durable. However, once the tileset is rendered, it’s not easy to change the look of the raster image. You will need to render a new tileset and replace the old. Because a tileset can contain millions of images, it’s not a quick replacement.
Gaming technology evolved in the browser and brought us WebGL and vector tilesets. These tileset features have attributes and are rendered programatically in the browser. It’s rather easy to change the appearance of a feature and Mapbox built a browser application, Studio, to create endless styles of maps using vector features. What’s not easy is serving a vector tileset to a client until recently. Libraries like PMTiles bundle a vector tileset into a single file that expose the necessary to the client browser.
More recently, elevation (terrain) tilesets have made 3D maps more exciting to create and explore. Once an elevation is loaded, all other layers, tilesets, etc. are draped over elevation surface. Depending on the resolution of the elevation data, this surface can dramatically change the appearance of the map.
Using an open source mapping library like MapLibre GL JS, a browser can simultaneous consume raster, vector, and terrain tilesets to make a 3D map for any place you have data. Kentucky has excellent data availabilty including lidar data to make high-resolution elevation surfaces. This map uses that lidar data to create the terrain tileset and a shaded relief raster tileset. The vector tilesets for trails, roads, etc. are derived exclusively from OpenStreetMap. The water layers are from the USGS National Hydrological Dataset.
Below is a screen capture of the web page and a link. You might notice that it doesn’t have all of the trails that our printed maps show. We may add those trails in the future, because it would helpful for planning your trip. And, we’re not planning to move to an exclusive mobile app. With all of the advances in mobile technology, we think paper maps are still essential for learning basic navigation and map reading.
Happy adventures!
If you visit this site often, you likely have a favorite map app on your phone. I certainly do and I have installed dozens of apps over the years. Most focus on placing your location as a dot on the map.
Any map app that shows your location as a dot on the map fosters a dependence on your exact location. We end up saying, "I am here" instead of asking "Where am I?"
To build strong spatial awareness, we should look at the dot after studying the plain map and doing an exercise in terrain association. Can we orient the map (best done with a paper map, folks) so that map north aligns with observed north? Can we then identify features on the map and estimate their distance from us?
These are questions in topograhic map reading. If you carefully observe your environment and compare its representation on the map, you will not need the dot.
Let’s say the early 1990s. Before that time, we used paper maps. Soon after, handheld GPS units became popular and only showed coordinates for your position and maybe some other location statistics like speed, elevation, distance & bearing to next waypoint. They were often used with a paper map that had a grid (with linear units on a flat space) or a graticule (angular units on a curved space) that helped a user measure their location.
Using coordinates, we looked at the paper map’s margin for marks that pointed you to a general location. To find the exact location, we looked up and asked, "Where am I?" and compared the map with what we saw. We built a mental map of our surroundings. There was no dot.
So, we thought we would kick it back to the 90s and make a browser app that mimics these early devices. Because our maps have detailed graticules and mile markers for the Sheltowee Trace, this app should compliment your journey into topography and map reading. This app is designed for mobile devices and below is a screen capture of a use on an iPhone.
This app is free, open source, doesn’t need to be installed, and won’t collect any information from you.
Happy adventures!
Oblique of Frankfort
Viewer interface
Viewer interface
Viewer interface
Oblique of Laurel Lake
Search by flight and shot ID
Attributes of image footprint centroid
Phase 1 decrease in height
Phase 2 increase in height
Phases combined
Phase 2 colorized with aerial photography
KyFromAbove Data Explorer