Blanton Forest is located on Pine Mountain in Harlan County and is the largest old-growth forest known in Kentucky. Trees that tower 100 feet above the forest floor are the same ones the settlers saw as they came through the Cumberland Gap and moved westward into Kentucky in the 1700s. The forest is a union of past and present, one of the rare places where nature's scheme has gone unchallenged and unexploited.

Several distinct natural communities are found in Blanton Forest. The most diverse of these is the mixed mesophytic forest. This forest typically includes a variety of canopy trees such as sugar maple, beech, tulip poplar, basswood, hemlock, and several species of oaks and magnolias. It is found on moist, rich slopes and in some ravines. The larger ravines, or hollows, support a hemlock dominated forest with a dense understory of rhododendrons. Drier sites on ridges support chestnut oak dominated forests as well as oak-pine forests. Small open seeps, often called bogs or mires are filled with sphagnum moss, cinnamon ferns and wildflowers. They are located in the heads of some hollows on the south face of the mountain. Watts Creek, a stream within the preserve that supports a population of the federally threatened fish, Blackside dace, begins in one of these seeps.

Blanton Forest is named in honor of former owners Grover and Oxie Blanton. The Blantons purchased the land in 1928 and passed it on to their daughters with the understanding that it would never be logged. The Blanton family’s desire to protect the forest forever was fulfilled when the two parcels containing the old growth were acquired in 1995 and 2001 and dedicated as state nature preserves.