Pine Hill Cave - Rockcastle County, KY

This cave is a short drive from the campground.

The Main Entrance to Pine Hill Cave
Photo by Colin Gatland

Pine Hill Cave has a large impressive walk-in entrance. The arch is about 40 feet high and 20 feet wide, and may be the best looking entrance in Rockcastle County. Since the cave is very close to the highway, it is quite well known and easily accessible. Although all the local people know of the cave, they rarely visit it. Pine Hill Cave is heavily traveled and very popular with many Boy Scouts, high school groups, college geology groups, and others from both Kentucky and Ohio.

There is a story of a former owner building a dam near the entrance. He was going to get rich with a fishing pay -lake, but obviously his dam, built over porous limestone, never held water. During heavy rains the dam fills to overflowing and only then does water rush into the normally dry entrance of Pine Hill Cave.

In 1968 Bob Eggers showed me Pine Hill. I had been crawling around in Carter County and I was impressed. No one knew of a map other than a 1962 sketch by Russell and Costello, and so from 1971 to 1973 Pine Hill Cave became my pet project. I was trained in surveying techniques by CRF and Central Ohio Grotto members and as a high school teacher, I found many recruits for a weekend adventure in the Kentucky underground. After 28 survey trips we had accumulated 28,489.6 feet of cave (5.4 miles), and we were lucky enough to find some virgin cave too.

The main passage of Pine Hill Cave is about one mile long from upstream terminal breakdown to the downstream siphon and trends from northwest to southeast parallel to the valley. Other passages trend north-south along two side valleys. A deeply incised valley seems to block all passages at the northwest end. The Large Room in the cave is the last 400 feet of the main passage and is 40 feet wide by 20 to 30 feet high. The main stream in the cave comes out of breakdown about 300 feet north of the Large Room. The stream forms a beautiful falls and pool as it enters the main passage. Downstream the passage is 15 feet wide by 40 feet high as the water actively downcuts the floor, and there is a wider upper level meandering about 25 feet up. The stream follows the main passage to the east for 2000 feet, then turns south for about 2000 feet. A smaller stream joins from the west. In summer, this water is notably warmer than the main stream.

In this midsection are several segments of a former large passage each filled with clay and flowstone. In the Register Room near the main entrance the stream takes a sharp left and shortly a right into a clean, round, 8-foot tube which siphons in 250 feet. The stream emerges again in the southeast section and siphons again in a passage 4 feet high by 20 feet wide about 1,000 feet from the main entrance. From this downstream end of Pine Hill Cave it is only 800 feet to the end of the upstream survey of Blue Hole Cave. The Bluegrass Grotto has surveyed Blue Hole Cave, and its Pine Hill-like passage takes the water another mile where it emerges in the very impressive resurgence which then flows into Sinks of Roundstone.

Pine Hill Cave has three entrances and 150 feet of vertical relief. The Skylight Dome is a pit entrance 125 feet deep located on a hillside. The Hurricane Pit entrance is much more difficult to find. It was discovered by some Dayton Area Speleological Society members in winter when they saw a flume of steam. Leaves thrown into the hole were blown back out by a strong wind, hence the name. The entrance is climbable but the 20 foot high bell shaped room with a tight squeeze at the top should be rigged to get down. This part of the cave has some formations and domes but is also tight and not often visited.

Another interesting feature of Pine Hill Cave is its many domes. There are at least 24 scattered throughout the cave. There are three above the waterfall, and another impressive series in the Tower domes north of the Main Fork in the second passage on the left. Some may be over 150 feet high. As you slog through the many pools and drag your body through the several crawls you may also come across some of the biological residents. To mention a few, there are pack rats, blind crayfish, two kinds of salamander, many isolated bats, many small beetles, crickets, spiders, moths, worms, etc., and all the tiny creatures. There are nice fossil corals, some crinoids, and much chert in the upstream area.

Many of the side passages are interesting and worth investigating. Pine Hill is known more for passage size rather than for its formations, but there are stalagmites in the Art Room, a large flowstone mass in the Large Room, and many more formations scattered throughout the cave. Flooding may be a problem down stream from the Main Entrance since there are tree trunks around and a railroad tie wedged into the ceiling, but on a previous trip with two feet of water rushing into the entrance, the upstream area was unaffected. There are lots of pools in Pine Hill Cave, usually knee deep, and you come out with clean shoes. You can rush in and out in an hour, but to see the more than five miles of passage will take considerably longer and provide much more enjoyment.

Written By: Tom Cottrell