Berea Pinnacles

January 11, 2017

Day hike at the Berea Pinnacles
Berea KY

We had a warm front blow through and bring daytime highs into the 60s for a couple of days (very different from the week before) and I decided to take advantage of the day. The Berea Pinnacles have been on my todo list for a while and this looked like a good day to check it out. The forecast called for the rain to be done around 9am. While I was driving, a bit of rain came and went. I got to the trailhead and got out of the car to take off my fleece and it started to rain again, so I waited 5 minutes with the remainder of my coffee and the rain disappeared for the day. Perfect.

Map from the Berea website.

I first hiked up to the East Pinnacle and very much enjoyed the view. I'll bet it gets crowded on a nice weekend day, but today I had it all to myself. The sky was very interesting looking, occasionally the sun would come through the clouds enough to cast a shadow, but mostly very overcast, but neat clouds.

A pano stitched from 5 photos. I wanted to emphasize the clouds for this one.

Another pano with the valley and the clouds.

Along the trail was a huge rock with very obvious sedimentary layers, crazy to think all of Kentucky was under a sea 500 million years ago.

One last shot from the East Pinnacle.

I then headed towards the Eagle Nest. That ended up being a great place for lunch, not a bad view either.

After lunch, I looked at the map and decided to check out the end of the trail and headed out towards Robe and Basin Mountains. This was a good trail with a bit of steep ups and downs, but the best part was getting to the top of Basin Mountain.

You can see the yellow blaze on the right hand tree, the trail goes up through the crack in the rock.

A little easier to see the passage here.

After that I checked out the Rock House/Devil's Kitchen. The first photo is in the Rock House, the second is from the ridge looking down.

I ended up spending about 4 hours hiking and thoroughly enjoyed the area, but I am not sure I will be back soon. The views are great, but the Gorge is better and I suspect that this area is very crowded on nice days and since it is so much smaller than the Gorge it would likely feel crowded. With that said, if I lived in Berea or Richmond, I'd likely be here quite a bit. I'm very glad I checked it out.