Red River Gorge Geological Area
More than one hundred natural arches, narrow ridges, rock shelters, cliff-base forests, and the Wild and Scenic Red River form a landscape read vertically as much as horizontally.
United States: places and wildlife — page 54
Browse the published Explore collection for United States. Open a discovery for its field guide, practical details, and background.
Breaks Interstate Park
Kentucky and Virginia share a rugged gorge of sandstone walls, whitewater, forest, overlooks, and cultural landscapes, often promoted as the Grand Canyon of the South but better understood on its own terms.
Yahoo Falls
A 113-foot ribbon drops from an overhang into a huge rock shelter, reached by a forest loop whose stairs, wet stone, and seasonal flow shape the experience.
Bad Branch State Nature Preserve
A boulder-filled stream leads to a 60-foot waterfall and onward through hemlock-hardwood forest toward High Rock, protecting rare plants and a cooler mountain microclimate.
Sheltowee Trace National Recreation Trail
Nearly 350 miles connect northern Kentucky to Tennessee through Daniel Boone National Forest, Big South Fork, road walks, arches, river crossings, and resupply gaps.
Pine Mountain State Scenic Trail
Built in connected sections along Pine Mountain, the route links overlooks, rare habitats, state preserves, and communities while the larger cross-state vision remains unfinished.
Dawkins Line Rail Trail
A converted rail corridor carries cyclists, walkers, and riders through eastern Kentucky hollows, trestles, the 1,556-foot Gun Creek Tunnel, and communities shaped by timber and coal transport.
Legacy Trail
The shared-use route connects downtown corridors and neighborhoods with rolling Bluegrass farmland and the Kentucky Horse Park, making changing land use visible at bicycle speed.
Yew Dell Botanical Gardens
The former Theodore Klein nursery combines display gardens, rare woody plants, trial beds, architecture, and paths that reveal horticulture as long observation rather than instant decoration.
Waterfront Botanical Gardens
Contemporary planting, water management, education, and phased construction transform a former dump beside highways into a public landscape still visibly becoming itself.
The Arboretum, State Botanical Garden of Kentucky
The Walk Across Kentucky groups plants by regional habitats, while horticultural collections, prairie, and a children’s garden connect native ecology with designed learning.
Boone County Arboretum
More than 3,600 trees and shrubs line miles of paths inside an active recreation complex, creating an unusually accessible collection for comparing mature landscape plants.
Bernheim Forest and Arboretum
More than 16,000 acres hold arboretum collections, restored habitats, lakes, research plots, art installations, and Forest Giants that draw visitors into a much larger conservation landscape.
Louisville Zoo
Gorillas, big cats, polar and grizzly bears, reptiles, island species, and immersive regional habitats make enclosure design as worth studying as the animal list.
Newport Aquarium
Shark tunnels, touch habitats, freshwater systems, penguins, and the Ohio River setting move visitors from spectacle toward adaptations, water quality, and connected ecosystems.
Salato Wildlife Education Center
Native fish, reptiles, birds, elk, bison, bears, wetlands, and trails emphasize the Commonwealth’s ecosystems and wildlife-management questions rather than a global zoo checklist.
Kentucky Reptile Zoo
A specialized collection supports venom extraction, research, and public education, offering close views of snakes and other reptiles with staff interpretation focused on biology and safety.
Kentucky Cave Shrimp
This eyeless endangered shrimp lives in underground streams of the Mammoth Cave system, where clean groundwater and organic drift determine survival.
Kentucky Arrow Darter
Males flash blue-green and orange in breeding season, but this threatened darter’s real signature is life in clear, rocky Appalachian headwaters.
Louisville Cave Beetle
This tiny pigmentless ground beetle is built for darkness and known from a restricted cave range near Louisville, where karst protection reaches below city growth.
Kentucky Glade Cress
Small white-to-lilac flowers appear in thin, seasonally wet limestone soils around Louisville, then the federally threatened plant completes its life before summer heat.
Short’s Goldenrod
Arching sprays of yellow bloom on sunny limestone slopes and rights-of-way, where disturbance can either maintain open habitat or destroy a globally rare plant.
Cumberland Darter
This federally endangered darter survives in a limited set of clear headwater streams in Kentucky and Tennessee, making connected riffles and clean gravel critical.
Tennessee State Museum
Six permanent galleries move from deep time and Indigenous nations through statehood, conflict, industry, civil rights, music, and contemporary Tennessee.
Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum
Recordings, instruments, clothing, manuscripts, cars, film, and studio technology trace country music from regional traditions to a worldwide commercial language.
National Museum of African American Music
Gospel, blues, jazz, R&B, hip-hop, classical traditions, and electronic production meet in galleries that connect sound to worship, migration, protest, technology, and commerce.
Frist Art Museum
The Frist has no permanent collection display; ambitious borrowed exhibitions, regional artists, and a hands-on art studio continuously remake the visit inside a 1934 Art Deco building.
Lane Motor Museum
Microcars, propeller cars, amphibious machines, rear-engine experiments, and unusual European designs show how many plausible futures existed beyond familiar American automobiles.
Adventure Science Center
A multilevel climbing structure links exhibits on physics, health, earth science, engineering, and space, with a full-dome planetarium for a focused second experience.
National Civil Rights Museum
The museum connects slavery, Jim Crow, organized resistance, court battles, direct action, Black Power, and ongoing struggles to the motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
Stax Museum of American Soul Music
The museum stands on the original Stax site and rebuilds its story through studio equipment, records, stage clothing, films, a transplanted church, and Isaac Hayes’s Cadillac.
Memphis Rock 'n' Soul Museum
A Smithsonian-developed exhibition follows field hollers, gospel, blues, country, soul, and rock through migration, radio, record shops, studios, and the social barriers musicians crossed.
Memphis Museum of Science & History
Natural history, regional culture, archaeology, a planetarium, giant-screen theater, and the restored Pink Palace mansion make this a hybrid rather than a single-subject science museum.
Metal Museum
Galleries, sculpture grounds, smithy, foundry, and conservation lab place finished vessels and sculpture beside the heat, tools, repair, and collective knowledge that make them possible.
Hunter Museum of American Art
Painting, sculpture, photography, craft, and new media span colonial portraiture to contemporary work while an 1905 mansion, 1970s structure, and modern wing frame changing ideas of display.
Creative Discovery Museum
Water, music, art, engineering, climbing, early-childhood play, and temporary programs create a hands-on visit that rewards building, testing, performing, and starting again.
Museum of Appalachia
Dozens of relocated log structures, tools, folk art, musical instruments, gardens, and animals form an open-air collection shaped by founder John Rice Irwin’s intensive collecting.
East Tennessee History Center
Permanent and changing galleries connect Cherokee homelands, frontier settlement, divided Civil War loyalties, industry, migration, music, and everyday life across a mountainous region.
Discovery Park of America
A ten-story central museum and fifty-acre grounds combine natural history, science, transportation, regional history, agriculture, military artifacts, historic buildings, and a recreated wetland.
McClung Museum of Natural History & Culture
Archaeology, anthropology, ancient Mediterranean objects, fossils, decorative arts, and Tennessee natural history share a research museum on the University of Tennessee campus.
Knoxville Museum of Art
Regional historical and contemporary art surrounds Richard Jolley’s enormous glass installation, while changing exhibitions connect Knoxville makers to wider American movements.
Andrew Jackson's Hermitage
The mansion, cabins, fields, cemetery, museum, and archaeology interpret Andrew Jackson’s political life alongside the labor and family histories of more than 150 enslaved people.
Belle Meade Historic Site
A Greek Revival mansion, grounds, outbuildings, horse-breeding history, and the Journey to Jubilee tour reveal both an influential stud farm and the enslaved labor that sustained it.
Ryman Auditorium
Built for revival meetings, later home to the Grand Ole Opry, the Ryman joins architecture, broadcasting, segregation history, touring performance, and unusually responsive acoustics.
Graceland
The mansion, personal collections, aircraft, cars, stage clothing, archives, and memorial garden reveal Elvis Presley’s domestic taste, creative career, business world, and extraordinary afterlife.
Sun Studio
The upstairs exhibition and original recording room connect Sam Phillips, blues artists, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and the technology of early independent recording.
Andrew Johnson National Historic Site
A visitor center, tailor shop, early home, Homestead, and cemetery examine Johnson’s rise from poverty, presidency after Lincoln, impeachment, and deeply consequential opposition to Black civil rights.
Fort Donelson National Battlefield
Earthworks, river batteries, roads, monuments, and winter terrain preserve the February 1862 campaign that opened the Cumberland River and produced Ulysses S. Grant’s first major victory.