North Carolina
A parking lot, visitor center, and viewing platform have been built at the summit of Mount Mitchell, the highest point on the East Coast.
The Appalachian Mountains aren’t known for majestic heights—the highest peak, Mount Mitchell, in western North Carolina, tops out at 6684 feet. It is the highest summit east of the Mississippi River, but it hasn’t always worn the eastern high-point crown. In the early 1800s, Mount Washington in New Hampshire was thought to be the East’s highest point. In 1835, Elijah Mitchell, a professor from the University of North Carolina, bushwhacked to the top of the mountain that would bear his name and took barometric readings to estimate the altitude. Impressively, his primitive calculations fell short by only twelve feet; his efforts were enough to dethrone Mount Washington, which is actually the eighth highest in the East, at 6289 feet.
From the air, Mount Mitchell is noticeable as part of the Black Mountains, a region of the Appalachians named for the thick swaths of spruce and fir trees that darken the range. North Carolina Highway 128 can be seen running up to a parking lot near the summit.
Mount Mitchell stands tall thanks to its geologic history. The rocks making up the mountain were laid down as marine deposits during the late Precambrian Era, more than 500 million years ago. After they were buried, heat and pressure metamorphosed the rocks into gneiss and schist, very hard rocks that tend to erode slowly. During a later episode of Appalachian mountain building, between 325 and 260 million years ago, what is now Africa collided with North America in the process of forming the supercontinent Pangaea, and these ancient metamorphic rocks were uplifted to Rocky Mountain heights. Geologists think the Appalachians may have once been one of the most impressive mountain ranges on Earth, but hundreds of millions of years of erosion have reduced them to majestic hills.
Today, Mount Mitchell is protected by Mount Mitchell State Park within Pisgah National Forest. Here, the Black Mountains are home to six of the ten highest peaks in the eastern United States, including Mount Mitchell and Mount Craig, the second-highest Appalachian pinnacle at 6647 feet. The Black Mountains are notorious for some of the most rugged hiking in the Appalachians, including the Mount Mitchell Trail, which runs from the Black Mountain campground to the Mount Mitchell summit, for a strenuous round-trip hike of about eleven and a half miles. Less hardy folk can drive to the summit, where a large parking area and observation deck are open year-round, weather permitting.
Mount Mitchell, on the left horizon in this photograph, looms over the rest of the Black Mountains. The perspective is from the Blue Ridge Parkway, which winds through the Appalachians.
The relatively high elevation of the Black Mountains makes them a biological island, an isolated environment home to species otherwise found only much farther north. Many of the ninety-some bird species here are northern species, more common to New England and Canada. Each winter, when the upper reaches of the range see more than sixty inches of snow, bird species like Carolina chickadees and slate-colored juncos, which normally migrate long distances, simply travel down the mountain to seek milder temperatures.
Mount Mitchell can sometimes be seen on flights to Asheville, North Carolina, or Knoxville, Tennessee.
