The Old Lookout Tower on Mount Mitchell

A few years ago they decided to tear down the old viewing tower on Mount Mitchell, the highest mountain in the eastern USA. I'd always liked that structure, but apparently it wasn't handicap accessible and so it was ordered destroyed and rebuilt. These days it's a much shorter platform, more like a big concrete table than a tower. And there's a ramp leading to it so that those who are in wheelchairs can get up there. Plus a paved pathway from the parking lot to the platform.

The old lookout tower on Mount Mitchell. Gone, now.

I know I must have taken more photographs of the old tower, but I can't find any. Just the long-distance shots I made of the summit, generally taken from nearby peaks. This one I took from near the top of the East's second-highest, Mount Craig. Craig is just a tad shorter than Mitchell and, to my way of thinking, is a more spectacular peak by just about any standard other than height. Because Craig is not the highest, there's no road to the top, no buildings up there, no restaurant, no bathrooms, no paved access, and--best of all--no crowds.

I snapped this one near the top of Mount Craig, with Mitchell and the old tower looming on the horizon.

This is Ridgepole Mountain. Ridgepole Mountain is located just barely north of the NC/GA border. If not for a bit of interesting history, this mountain would have ended up in Georgia instead of North Carolina. Since Ridgepole Mountain is over 5,000 feet above sea level, it would have easily displaced Brasstown Bald as the highest peak in Georgia. If that had happened, Ridgepole Mountain would--like Brasstown Bald today--have a paved road leading to the top, along with a museum and visitor center and bathrooms and who knows what else. But because it ended up being just another 5,000-foot peak in a state packed with mountains that tall, Ridgepole sits in the middle of a huge wilderness area with no roads whatsoever and only a couple of trails on it (including the Appalachian Trail), providing habitat for a vast population of wildlife. Mile for mile there are more bears in this area than even in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. So, happily for those of us who love wilderness, it didn't end up being Georgia's highest peak and instead is just one more 5,000-foot summit in North Carolina.

Ridgepole Mountain

Years and years ago I went hiking on the Appalachian Trail to get to a point where I could bushwhack to the summit of a mountain named Ridgepole Mountain. The old story when I was a kid was that Ridgepole Mountain was originally supposed to have been in Georgia. That is, the northern boundary of Georgia was to have been struck slightly north of where it ended up. However, the local Cherokees were in an agitated state and the surveyors tasked with marking the northern boundary were afraid to proceed, so they just picked a convenient spot and called it the northern boundary of the state.

Therefore, as all good little hiking Georgians from the days of my youth would say, WE WUZ ROBBED!

Robbed of what?

Well, apparently we were robbed of some 5,000-foot peaks. That was the buzz along the trail when I was a kid. If only those surveyors hadn't been such scaredy-cats, then we'd have some fivers in my native state. And I would always think about what would have happened if Ridgepole Mountain had become our highest point. Instead of Brasstown Bald having a road carved onto its slopes and all the way to the summit; instead of Brasstown Bald having its top leveled and a huge brick and concrete visitor's center lodged on its high point, then all of those crimes would have been committed against Ridgepole Mountain.

And what is Ridgepole Mountain now? It sits in the middle of a relatively enormous (by eastern standards) wilderness. There is nothing built on its summit. There are no roads gouged into its flanks. It sits in a sea of green, just one more 5,000-foot mountain surrounded by other 5,000-foot mountains.

Hiking on Ridgepole Mountain and the surrounding untouched wilderness, I'm always very happy that those Cherokee braves scared off those European surveyors.

Off in the distance there is Ridgepole Mountain. I took this shot from a mountain called Pickens Nose, named for the Revolutionary War general, Andrew Pickens (whose life served as the fictional basis for the character in the film THE PATRIOT). In real life, Pickens was a stealer of Cherokee land and killer of that nation's people.

This was, as near as I could figure through line of sight, the actual summit of Ridgepole Mountain. There is no visitor's center here. No road. No cars, no trucks, and other than me that day, no people. Just a great southern hardwood forest. It also has the highest bear population density in the southeast.

I found this really excellent campsite on the way to the bushwhack to Ridgepole. It's not far off the Appalachian Trail. Another neat feature of this campsite is that just a few feet away is a sheer cliff that plummets many hundreds (maybe over a thousand) feet.

Just beyond those shrubs is the edge of the cliff. Since I was all alone, that was as close as I dared go.

For contrast, this is what could have become of Ridgepole Mountain if it had ended up in Georgia instead of North Carolina. If it had been Georgian territory, it would have been our only 5,000-foot peak and would be ruined, as the summit of Brasstown Bald is ruined...

Instead, this is the extent of the engineering done on the slopes and ridges of Ridgepole Mountain. You can thank the Cherokee warriors of many generations gone...