Grandfather Mountain is a splendid island in the sky.
At 5,946 feet Grandfather’s craggy face stares over the North Carolina Piedmont with an equanimity that belies the sometimes violent swings in weather that flow around the four peaks that make up the summit.
During a recent visit the weather went from high clouds to driving rain followed by a smothering fog and then fast-dropping temperatures capped by a spectacular sunset.
With all that, countless visitors have scrambled over Grandfather in the decades since the late Hugh MacRae Morton built a road to the summit and set the famous mile-high swinging bridge swaying to the tentative steps of an intrepid few in 1952.
Grandfather has become an iconoclastic symbol of the fast vanishing wilderness that was once all of western North Carolina.
And, for most of the years since European settlement, the mountain has rested in private hands. Hands that, by and large, respected Grandfather for what it is – a force of nature considered important enough to be designated an international biosphere reserve.
Morton’s famous feud with the U.S. Park Service is one example of the family’s devotion to place. The tiff resulted in the Linn Cove Viaduct hanging from the east face of Grandfather.
The park service had wanted to dynamite the summit and pave it over to complete the Blue Ridge Parkway.
The Nature Conservancy, long-time partners with the Morton family, considers Grandfather Mountain a site of major significance because it is home to more globally rare species than any mountain east of the Rockies.
In April 2009 most of the upper slopes became North Carolina’s newest state park. The Morton family sold 2,600 acres to the state for $12 million and tied up the remaining 700 acres (containing visitors facilities, nature center and MacRae Meadows – home to the annual Highland Games) in the Grandfather Mountain Stewardship Foundation.
About 4,000 acres are held in conservation easement with the Nature Conservancy and tens of thousands of acres on the east-facing side of the mountain are protected as part of the Pisgah National Forest.
The non-profit that took over from the Morton family is tasked to serve the public through education and research projects.
It is a charge they take seriously at Grandfather, said Jesse Pope, chief naturalist.
At least 50 globally rare and endangered species cluster around the summit, Pope said.
“We are very much a geologic and climatological island here,” Pope said.
Many of the species found at the summit are northern ones, he said and the rock that forms the famous four peaks is oddball, too. It is made of sedimentary sandstone that was metamorphosed about 700 million years ago when the Appalachians were thrust up from an ancient seafloor by the collision between the African and North American plates.
Go a few hundred feet down the mountain and the metamorphosed sandstone peters out and granitic gneiss that is about 1 billion years old takes hold.
The overthrust belts of younger stone have by and large been worked away at Grandfather giving geologists a peek through what is called a window at the much older underlying rock.
Heavy-duty science aside, most visitors come to Grandfather for the views, said Landis Wofford, news director for the park.
Early or late on clear winter or fall days it is possible by using binoculars to see lights glowing in the windows of the skyscrapers in downtown Charlotte, 75 miles away.
“We get about 250,000 visitors a year here,” she said. “And we are open every day of the year, weather permitting.”
The weather permitting part is best remembered in the colder months, she said.
“We were closed for a long time last winter,” Wofford said.
Something on the order of four inches of solid ice crusted the summit at one point.
“And that was after we could get back into the park to measure,” Pope said. “Chances are it was thicker at the height of that storm.”
Morton, a lifelong photographer and teacher at the University of North Carolina, lives on in Grandfather’s justly famous nature photography weekend (June 4 through 6) and the amateur and professional camera clinic Aug. 21 through 22).
Grandfather has become something of a shutter bug Mecca over the years and the two photography events sell out within minutes of being opened to reservations, Wofford said.
HOW TO GET THERE
From Greenville take U.S. 25 to Interstate 26 and head toward Asheville.
At Asheville turn east on Interstate 40 and follow it to exit 81 at Marion.
Follow Sugar Hill Road into town and then take U.S. 221 to Linville Falls.
At Linville Falls take the Blue Ridge Parkway North until it rejoins U.S. 221.
Turn right onto U.S. 221.
The Entrance to the Grandfather Mountain is about a mile away on the right.
