On Thursday I headed over to Cantwell Cliffs. This is one of the units of Hocking Hills State Park and Hocking State Forest. All of the other units are pretty-much connected, but Cantwell Cliffs stands alone. It is also the most northernmost unit. It turns out that I haven’t been there in probably 10 years, so I thought I’d add it to the areas that I’ve mapped.
I of course brought along with me topo maps of the park.
When I entered the park, I was greeted by the following map on a bulletin board:
Bulletin Board Trail Map
Hmmm. Something seemed odd. The entrance road and parking lot seemed to on the end of a ridge, but if you overlaid the topography of the bulletin board map with the topo map, the parking lot should have been in a valley, not on a ridge. It turns out that the bulletin board map was just plain old wrong. Somebody, with the best of intentions, I’m sure, just didn’t know how to read terrain.
However, I do, and so here is the map I produced for where the trails are:
Actual Trails at Cantwell Cliffs
You can kind of see where they went wrong. Interestingly, since Hocking Hills is such a tourist destination, there are quite a few websites with maps. This website is wrong; this website gets it right.
Regardless, it was a fun afternoon. The trillium is in bloom. I took this photo which was taken just below the “Fat Woman’s Squeeze”:
Trillium at Cantwell Cliffs
May apples are just coming up (the leaves are still pretty small, and there are no flowers yet). Other wild-flowers were in abundance.
Cantwell Cliffs is an archetypal example of what makes Hocking Hills so spectacular, and it is just full of recess caves. We’ve been getting quite a bit of rain lately, so the waterfall was looking pretty good:
Main Waterfall at Cantwell Cliffs
Ahcuah 
Btw. maybe I’m asking on the wrong site but tell me how are hiking trails marked in america(That is for tourists not to get lost or to find a trail without a map). In most of eastern europe they are marked on trees or rocks by white-color-white stripes painted on rocks, trees etc. Although i must say that even these signs are sometimes very hard to spot.
Hi, jardo.
A lot really depends on the park or area one is in. Yesterday, I was at a somewhat smallish park called Charles Alley Park. It is owned by the city of Lancaster (but is still pretty wild and rugged, just small). There, the trails are not marked with any marker, but every intersection has a map of the park and where you are on the map.
Most state parks or state forests do something similar to what you described: putting blazes on trees. Usually, different trails have different colored blazes. For instance, the Buckeye Trail always has slate blue blazes (and it often additionally has a little metal marker). In Hocking Hills State Park, the main trail is the Buckeye Trail, so of course that is marked with slate blue. But there is also a rim trail which is marked in red. Hocking Hills is nice in that they also have directional signs.
Finally, the state forests have bridle trails (for horses). For Hocking State Forest, their bridle trail map is here. If you look at it you can see that there is a Purple trail, an Orange trail, and a Red trail. Those are the colors of the blazes for each particular trail.
Hope this helps.