William Stanek's Mammoth Cave, Cumberland & Kentucky Highlands
A Literary Field Guide to Mammoth Cave, Cumberland & Kentucky Highlands National Parks & Scenic Sites

Kentucky's deepest landscape is partly invisible from the surface. Karst, sinking water, caves, rivers, forest, sandstone highlands, cliffs, hollows, and Cumberland country create an above-ground and below-ground travel world in which geology repeatedly changes how people move. William Stanek's Mammoth Cave, Cumberland & Kentucky Highlands joins those layers. Mammoth Cave anchors the underground world, but the larger journey restores river, ridge, forest, historic routes, overlooks, and highland landscapes to the story. A cave tour and a mountain walk are not interchangeable outings. Weather matters differently. Distance is felt differently. Even water can disappear from one landscape and reappear in another. For families, couples, solo travelers, hikers, cave enthusiasts, photographers, and road trippers, this is a guide to Kentucky and Cumberland country as one interconnected physical system-where what lies beneath the surface changes everything above it.