In the late 1700s, westbound settlers on the Wilderness Road welcomed their first sight of White Rocks, a bright sandstone beacon that signaled Cumberland Gap was only another day's walk away, though few if any of those travelers climbed up to it. Today, hikers take a three-mile one-way route that rises about 2,000 feet to the top of the broad sandstone cliffs, whose massive outcroppings stand 3,500 feet above sea level and offer views south into Virginia's Powell Valley and north across Kentucky's coves and ridges. The same trailhead also leads to Sand Cave, reached by an eight-mile round trip to a seventy-five-foot-high sandstone overhang with a small waterfall near the entrance most of the year, and to Hensley Settlement, where several mountaintop Appalachian farmsteads begun by Sherman Hensley in 1903 include more than forty log cabins, barns, and outbuildings that show how pioneers built new lives with limited tools in harsh backcountry conditions.