Most of Ohio was flattened by the last ice age, but the southeast corner sits on the unglaciated Allegheny Plateau - the hill country the glaciers never reached. Zaleski State Forest is squarely in this terrain, with ridges and ravines rising to about 1,100 feet above sea level. The land never got the smoothing-out treatment the rest of Ohio received, which is why the topography here looks more like West Virginia than like the Ohio cornfields just to the north. Steep slopes, deep hollows, sandstone outcroppings, and the kind of mature hardwood forest that gets dense enough to make a summer afternoon feel cool.

The forest wraps around Lake Hope State Park, which preserves both the lake itself and the historic Hope Furnace, a 19th-century iron smelter that gave the lake and the surrounding region their name. The Hope Furnace once smelted ore from the iron-rich hills of Vinton County, contributing to Ohio's brief but intense role in pre-Civil War iron production. The furnace ruins still stand across the road from the forest. The lake came later, an artificial impoundment built to provide cooling water for industrial operations that never quite materialized at the scale planned. Recreation grew up around the lake and the forest grew up around both.

Part of the Zaleski Mound Group, three Adena burial mounds dating to roughly 800 BC through AD 100, lies within the forest boundaries. The largest of the three, the Ranger Station Mound, stands 14.4 feet tall near the forest's main entrance. The Moonville ghost town, a 19th-century coal-mining community now reduced to a tunnel and a cemetery, sits along what is now the Moonville Rail-Trail running through the forest. Layer after layer of Ohio history - Adena burial, iron furnace, coal mine, railroad, recreation - is stacked on the same hill country. The forest carries all of it.

Ohio's state forests operate on sustained-yield timber management, which means the Division of Forestry calculates how much wood the forest grows each year and harvests a portion of that growth, leaving the rest. The white oak that ended up in Thompson Library was harvested under this principle, marked individually for cutting, then milled and sent to Columbus. The library renovation became a case study in sustainable design, recognized in part for the locally sourced wood. A visitor sitting on the third floor of Thompson reading a book is sitting in a room paneled with trees that grew on the hill country an hour and a half south, in a forest that grew back from Depression-era abandoned farms. The trees are still standing in Zaleski. The new ones are coming up to replace them.