Grandfather Mountain

Grandfather Mountain rises to five thousand nine hundred forty-six feet and dominates the skyline along the upper Blue Ridge Parkway in Avery County. The mountain blocked completion of the Parkway for nearly two decades. Hugh Morton, the private owner who inherited the land in the nineteen forties, refused to sell, insisting instead that any road be built using special techniques that would not scar the mountain's fragile slopes.

That standoff produced one of the most remarkable bridges in American highway history: the Linn Cove Viaduct, completed in nineteen eighty-three and dedicated in nineteen eighty-seven, which wound around the mountain's contours rather than blasting through them. After Morton died, his family sold about twenty-six hundred acres to the state of North Carolina, which became Grandfather Mountain State Park. The mountain is also one of the most biodiverse sites in the southern Appalachians, sheltering rare species found nowhere else on Earth.