Within the Daniel Boone National Forest lies an area that has been largely untouched.

It's known as Tight Hollow, and it's dense with gigantic old trees and rhododendron.

It's one of Kentucky's few remaining old-growth forests.

We recently got the chance to visit this incredibly precious land to learn about why its preservation is so important.

Check it out.

[music playing] It is a pristine place.

I would describe it as enchanting, amazing.

It's unique because of the geological nature of it and also the old-growth timber, old-growth trees we have in here.

If you do get in there, you're kind of in this valley with towering cliffs around you, some large trees that have developed there over time because it was so inaccessible, and not a lot of impact from people.

[music playing] The way that I understand it, it was named Tight Hollow because they couldn't get in here to get the timber out during the logging industry in the early 1900s.

Back in the early parts of the 20th century, there was a lot of timber harvesting occurring, and it created a lot of problems, a massive wildfires.

So, Congress authorized National Forest to acquire a lot of these lands that had been so cut over.

So, Tight Hollow was one of those areas that was purchased pretty early on in the 1930s.

But since the Forest Service acquired it, this area has been managed more in a primitive state.

[music playing] All the area around here is unique, and I say unique because of the cliff line, the protecting overhangs that houses the remains of fragile archeological sites, prehistoric Native American sites.

It was used for thousands of years.

You know, people lived here, hunted here, fished here.

We have archeologists that have found, you know, documentation and evidence of those prior civilizations that were here.

They would go into a little ravine like Tight Hollow here.

They'd find a -- probably get an access off the ridge through a gap, and they would make camp there.

It's an area where there's an overhang, a bit of a waterfall here, so a water source.

And judging by the soils, the dark nature of the soils, and it's relatively flat here, early Americans would have used this shelter.

Old-growth forest is one that's not been logged.

It's just natural.

One of the ways that we look at an area and establish that it's truly old-growth or virgin timber is that we look at not only the size of the trees, but the canopy of the trees.

So, once a tree gets above the rest of the canopy, it starts to spread.

Way in the background, you see one big tree.

That's an Eastern hemlock.

And I estimate the tree to be 400 to 500 years old.

And when they were cutting timber, they didn't really cut the hemlocks.

They wanted the hardwoods, like the tulip poplars and the oaks and the hickories, and they left the hemlocks.

So, that's why you see a lot of these really big hemlocks, because they just left them alone.

[music playing] The animals you would find here would be things like the spotted skunk, which lives in these grottoes and crevices.

We also have the Allegheny woodrat here that lives in the cliff lines, and it's pretty much an obligate species, which means that it's tied to the cliff lines.

What's neat about the woodrat is that it builds these little oven-like structures where it has its young.

[music playing] Up here in Tight Hollow, there's a rare plant called Lucy Braun's white snakeroot.

And what's special about that, this is the most northern population of that species on the planet, is Tight Hollow.

[music playing] So, back from, say, the 1930s to the 1960s, a lot of the Daniel Boone National Forest was relatively lightly visited.

A few people knew about it.

You know, there were some locals, of course, that used the area to hunt and fish and camp and all that kind of stuff.

Some steps were constructed to access the area.

But at that time, they were thinking, "Well, let's build something where people can go in and take a look."

Since it was a designated trail, people was starting to use it to camp in.

The dispersed recreation was impacting the plant life, especially the old-growth timber.

So, if that had continued, I can't imagine what this place would look like now.

This is an area that's unique.

Let's try to preserve it and let ecological processes operate freely here and not have a lot of people coming into this particular area or a lot of disturbance.

Let's not build any trails or roads.

And so, it was kind of just left alone at that point to allow those processes and encourage research.

[music playing]