Most people drive past Southern Illinois and completely miss these ancient bluffs above the trees

Southern Illinois’ wildest surprise

Southern Illinois doesn’t get a lot of credit. Most people picture cornfields and interstates, not rock formations older than the dinosaurs jutting out above miles of unbroken forest.

But in the far southern tip of the state, inside the Shawnee National Forest, a place called Garden of the Gods sits on a set of bluffs that will stop you cold.

It’s free, it’s open year-round, and most people driving through the Midwest have no idea it exists.

These rocks were here before the dinosaurs

The sandstone you’ll walk across at Garden of the Gods started forming about 320 million years ago, during a period called the Carboniferous.

A giant inland sea covered parts of what is now Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky.

Rivers carried sand and mud to the shoreline, where it piled up and compressed into rock thousands of feet thick. Eventually, the bedrock pushed upward.

Wind, rain and freeze-thaw cycles went to work on it for millions of years. What you see today is what survived all that time.

Why these bluffs look nothing like the rest of Illinois

Most of Illinois got scraped flat by glaciers during the last ice age.

The ice stopped just north of this area, which is why southern Illinois has hills, hollows and exposed rock formations instead of flat farmland.

The Shawnee sits in a narrow strip of land between the Ohio River to the east and the Mississippi to the west, and the terrain here belongs to a completely different Illinois than the one most people picture.

That geographic quirk is the reason Garden of the Gods exists.

The Observation Trail puts you on top of the bluffs

The main trail at Garden of the Gods is a quarter-mile loop paved with natural flagstone. It winds up to the tops of the bluffs through wooden and rock steps, with benches along the way if you need a break.

Interpretive signs explain what you’re looking at and how it got that way.

The whole loop takes between 30 minutes and an hour depending on how long you linger, and most people linger. The views stretch for miles across a canopy of hardwood forest with no buildings in sight.

Camel Rock made it onto a U.S. quarter

The most famous formation along the trail is Camel Rock, a sandstone pillar shaped so much like a camel’s hump that the U.S. Mint put it on a quarter in 2016.

It was the 31st coin in the America the Beautiful series and one of only five to feature a national forest. Other formations along the trail have names too: Table Rock, Devil’s Smokestack, Anvil Rock.

They were all carved by the same erosion forces, just in different directions. You’ll also spot unnamed formations and find yourself trying to figure out what they look like.

Go deeper into the wilderness on longer trails

If a quarter-mile loop sounds too short, the area has 5.5 miles of interconnecting trails.

The Indian Point Trail runs about 1.7 miles through pine forest that shifts into hardwood timber before climbing to a hilltop with valley views below.

Down off the bluffs, the trails get quieter and more secluded, and you’ll pass rock formations at eye level instead of looking down at them.

The River to River Trail, a long-distance route crossing southern Illinois from the Ohio to the Mississippi, also cuts through this wilderness.

Deer, raptors and a forest that changes with the seasons

The forest around the bluffs is a mix of oak, hickory and pine, with ferns covering the ground beneath the canopy. In spring, trillium, columbine and wild geranium push up along the trails.

By late October, the oaks and hickories turn red, orange and gold, and the bluffs give you a bird’s-eye view of all of it, dropping more than 100 feet to the forest floor below.

White-tailed deer show up regularly, and if you watch the sky above the bluffs, you may catch a raptor circling or spot a pileated woodpecker working a dead snag.

Rim Rock sits just down the road and rewards the detour

A short drive east on Karbers Ridge Road takes you to the Rim Rock National Recreation Trail, designated in 1980 for its scenic and historic value.

The upper trail is a paved 0.8-mile loop that follows the edge of a sandstone escarpment.

Wooden stairs drop you into the hollow below, where you can squeeze through narrow rock passageways and walk beneath massive cliff overhangs.

Along the route, you’ll pass the remnants of a stone wall built by prehistoric Native Americans. It’s easy to walk past it without noticing, so keep your eyes on the hillside.

Ox-Lot Cave and the lake at Pounds Hollow

At the base of the Rim Rock bluffs, a massive rock overhang called Ox-Lot Cave once sheltered the oxen and horses of 19th-century loggers working the area. Water still trickles from the base of the bluffs nearby.

Early settlers called the formation “the Pounds,” an old English word for enclosure, and the name stuck to the valley.

From the lower Rim Rock trail, a connecting path runs about half a mile to Pounds Hollow Lake, a 25-acre lake with a sandy swimming beach and forest on every side.

This wilderness used to be somebody’s farm

The land inside the Garden of the Gods Wilderness was once a patchwork of small farms and homesteads.

In the 1930s, the federal government bought those properties as part of a push to build public forestland, and by 1939 the Shawnee National Forest was officially established.

In 1990, the Illinois Wilderness Act set aside seven parcels of the Shawnee as permanent wilderness, and Garden of the Gods was one of them.

The second-growth forest has taken back most of the land, but old fruit trees and buried roads still turn up along the trails.

Best light hits the west-facing bluffs at sunset

The bluffs face west, which means the sandstone glows in warm light as the sun drops behind the forested hills.

Photographers show up throughout the day to work the interplay of light and shadow on the formations, but the hour before sunset is when the rock really comes alive.

Late October puts peak fall color and long golden light together at the same time. Sunrise visits draw fewer people and the light hits the eastern faces of the formations directly.

Either way, bring more battery than you think you’ll need.

The whole Shawnee is worth a longer look

The Shawnee National Forest covers roughly 289,000 acres between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, with seven wilderness areas and over 300 miles of marked trails.

Bell Smith Springs, to the west, has clear rocky streams, scenic canyons and a natural rock bridge. Little Grand Canyon near Carbondale runs a 3-mile loop through deep valleys and along cliff edges.

On the Ohio River, Cave-in-Rock State Park holds a massive limestone cavern once used by river pirates. Most people driving through southern Illinois don’t stop.

The ones who do tend to come back.

Visit Garden of the Gods in southern Illinois

To get there, take Karbers Ridge Road in Hardin County, about 13 miles east of Elizabethtown, Illinois. Garden of the Gods sits roughly 2.5 hours southeast of St. Louis and about three hours from Nashville or Louisville.

Admission is free and the site stays open year-round, with the Observation Trail running from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. If you want to stay overnight, the Pharaoh Campground near the trailhead has 12 sites with tables, fire grills, toilets and drinking water for $10 per night.

Cell service out here is spotty, so download your maps before you leave.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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