4 Days at Carter Caves State Park in Eastern Kentucky - Day 3

Note: Some links throughout our site are affiliate links, which means we may receive a small commission at no cost to you.

Lantern Tour of Saltpeter Cave at Carter Caves State Park, KY

Note: Some links throughout our site are affiliate links, which means we may receive a small commission at no cost to you.

This is the third post in a series for this trip. You can view links to the other posts at the bottom of this one.

On our third day at Carter Caves State Park, we hiked Cave Branch Trail (3.1 miles); toured the historic Saltpeter Cave, which played a role in gunpowder production during the War of 1812, by lantern light; hiked Raven Bridge Trail to check out one of the park’s natural bridges/arches and looped back on part of Three Bridges Trail and Rockhouse Trail (1.5 miles). All in, this we walked about 7.5 miles according to my Garmin tracker.

If you just want to skip to our adventure, scroll on; if you’re looking for some packing tips, here are our top gear recommendations for this trip. You can view more recommendations on our Ultimate Guide to Hiking Gear.

Comfortable hiking clothes - Our favorite options all come from REI. My favorite pants are prAna Halle and these are my favorite lightweight hiking t-shirts. Dustin has a couple of pairs of pants from prAna and the REI brand.

Light-weight raincoat - if there's a chance of rain, you won't regret bringing a lightweight waterproof jacket with you. My favorite is this GORE-TEX jacket, and it has seen many damp trails!
Hiking boots - Our current favorite brand is Oboz. Dustin has their Sawtooth model, and I have the Sapphire.
Hydration backpack - unless you are going for a very short hike, bringing water is a must. Dustin has a very old Camelbak circa 2000, and I have a new-ish one from Gregory that I have used on multiple hiking trips and love. While the Gregory Sula 16 is not currently available, here are some other options. We each have a 3-liter water bladder.
Headlight style flashlight - A headlight, like this one from REI that we each use, was a must for the self-guided cave tours. I’d also recommend bringing a small, bright hand-held for greater versatility.

Day 3: Cave Branch Trail, Raven Bridge Trail and the historic Saltpeter Cave at Carter Caves State Park

After a fairly heavy day of hiking the prior day, this would be a lighter day to give us a chance to rest up for the long hike on our final day. Before hiking, we stopped by the Welcome Center to purchase tickets to the 2pm Saltpeter Cave Tour’s special lantern tour version. More on that later!

hiking cave branch trail at carter caves

We got a later start to the day with a 2.5 mile trail on the docket for the morning, although we belatedly realized there was a 0.5 mile connecting trail we needed to add on either end. All-in, that should have made for a 3.5 mile hike but according to my watch, it was more like 3.1, probably because there was a tail midway through the loop to connect to yet another trail.

There are a few multi-use trails in Carter Caves and our morning hike was one – Cave Branch Trail. There are a few ways to get to Cave Branch Trail. The most direct is by taking a short drive outside of the park to a small trailhead parking area. We opted for that, and it was easy to find. How to get there: Coming out of the park, we took a left on route 182 then another left on a small country road called Oakland Ridge Road. This drive was roughly 5-8 minutes. The other access point to the trail would be to hike from the Welcome Center on a maintenance road to a small section of two other trails to eventually meet up with the Cave Branch Trail.

Cave Branch Trail certainly lives up to its name as a multi-use trail. It was quite torn up and muddy from horses. While there were some elevation changes, they were generally mild and spotty so it was a path that we could walk fairly quickly. The entire 3.1 miles took us about 1 hour 19 minutes. The path is a loop trail with one length running alongside Cave Branch, a sometime creek. During our visit, it was entirely dry, despite significant rains recently. The woods were pretty and green with the spring leaf growth, and all-in-all, it was a nice walk in the woods, despite the significant muddy sections. This is not a top hiking path in the park and not one that would be enjoyable on a sticky, buggy summer day, but with a slightly cloudy day with temps in the upper 60s, this was a nice way to spend some of the morning.

lunch at tierney’s cavern

For lunch, we returned to Tierney’s Cavern at the park lodge. On the hike, I had started craving a club sandwich, which I’d seen on their menu, and we got there in time to have lunch before our 2pm cave tour. The club sandwiches (we each got one) were great, enough so that we’d return for the same the following day after our 8.5 mile hike.

touring saltpeter cave with lanterns at carter caves

Saltpeter Cave is located just across the hill from the Welcome Center, though the tour starts just outside the Welcome Center. This cave is a winter hibernation spot for bats and so, like other local caves, is only open for tours seasonally. It just opened within the past week for this year’s season.

In addition to regular tours of Saltpeter Cave, they offer a lantern tour at 2pm three days per week (during their early summer season, check their website for current options), and we’d quickly decided that was on our to do list for the trip. I’ve always wanted to do a lantern tour of a cave so here was a chance! Saltpeter Cave is so-named because it was used to create saltpeter, an important ingredient in gunpowder, during the War of 1812. So this particular cave, which is more of a historic cave tour, is great to do by lantern light, just like the people using the cave at that time would have done.

Dustin and I had a bet as to whether these would be ‘real’ lanterns. Real meaning glass lanterns, not plastic; actual fire, not a modern light made to look like fire. I lost the bet. The lanterns were actual lanterns with burning flames, and they wisely do not let any children carry them.

While the other guided tours we had taken in the park were led by high school kids who were brand new and learning the ropes, this guide was more knowledgeable and clearly a history buff, which was really important for the experience of this cave.

The entry point to Saltpeter Cave is from above, so we descended a dark staircase that changed from cement steps to wooden ones to a final dirt step. The tour got underway at the bottom of the stairs while our eyes adjusted to the dim lantern light.

We learned some basics about the War of 1812 before continuing along to the next space that had examples of how the saltpeter was made. The work was incredibly difficult and labor intensive. A lot of water was needed to mix with the dirt in the cave, which held the right ingredient for saltpeter production. Young boys would haul water up from a creek outside of the cave way downhill. The workers received no pay for the work, having signed up due to patriotic fervor, the promise of three meals a day, and the hope for a land grant at the end of the war. There was (understandable) tension with the local Shawnee tribes so 2,000 US soldiers guarded the workers in the cave during this era.

Further into the cave, we saw an area that they believed the workers slept in when the weather outside was unpleasant, and a number of other areas of interest. This cave is entirely unlike the others and is clearly impacted by the humans that worked in it. In using the dirt to make saltpeter, the workers tossed huge amount of dirt along the cave’s walls so every passageway is lined with hardened dirt up to about waist height.

The tour lasted an hour, a bit longer than the 45 minutes advertised, though that may be unique to the pacing of the lantern tour. The cave had an uneven but generally flat floor and required occasional stooping (for adults) as we walked the halls of the cave. This cave is the coldest in the park at 48 degrees year-round. The reason for this is that its five entrances/exits are all above the cave and the heat rises to leave. This tour was great, and I’d definitely recommend it to others who enjoy history. Catch the lantern tour option if you can!

hiking raven bridge trail at carter caves

Finally, to round out the day with a final short hike of about 1.3 miles, we headed back up to the parking area near the Lodge to catch the Raven Bridge Trail, which is 0.7 miles one way. Raven Bridge Trail culminates at none other than Raven Bridge, one of the park’s natural bridges/arches. This one can be viewed from both above and below if you hike down several flights of stairs at the end of the path.

Raven Bridge from the top of the trail before taking stairs down

From there, hikers can back-track up the stairs or return to the Lodge area by taking the Three Bridges Trail for a bit. Once on Three Bridges, hikers can take that all the way back to the Lodge or take a cut-over connector trail called Rockhouse Trail (0.1 miles) back up to the Raven Bridge Trail. Since we’d already hiked Three Bridges, we took the connector trail and were glad we did. It held some amazing rock outcrops and rock faces, huge boulders, and was picturesque. This relatively short loop hike we took was through a peaceful, pretty part of the woods and had a few areas of uphill and downhill sprinkled throughout. We ended up with several ticks on us at the end of the day and suspect we picked them up during this part of our hiking, though we don’t know for sure. These were the first ticks we saw on the trip.