6,684 ft · Black Mountains
Mount Mitchell
The high point of North Carolina's Black Mountains at 6,684 feet, a Fraser fir summit named for the professor who died trying to settle its height.
The Country
Peaks and
landmarks.
A short list, chosen for the strength of what is known about each place rather than for height. Every entry says which range it stands in, who measured it, and what else in the atlas belongs to the same ground.
6,285 ft · Roan Highlands
Roan Mountain
The western half of the Roan Highlands, a ridge from Roan High Bluff to Roan High Knob carrying red spruce, Fraser fir and Catawba rhododendron gardens.
5,440 ft · Roan Highlands
Big Yellow Mountain
A grassy bald on the Roan where a family herd still grazes the summit, owned since 1975 by The Nature Conservancy and managed with the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy.
6,643 ft · Great Smoky Mountains
Kuwohi
The Smokies' highest summit, 6,643 feet, called Clingmans Dome from 1859 until its Cherokee name was restored in September 2024.
4,949 ft · Great Smoky Mountains
Gregory Bald
One of the two grassy balds the Park Service still keeps open in the Smokies, where wild azaleas have crossed into a swarm of colors from white to deep red.
4,930 ft · The Blue Ridge Escarpment
Whiteside Mountain
A 4,930-foot mountain on the Eastern Continental Divide with a south face of bare rock the Forest Service puts at 750 feet, where peregrine falcons nested every year from 1988 to at least 2006.
3,918 ft · Linville Gorge
Table Rock Mountain
The quartzite knob on Linville Gorge's east rim where mountain golden heather was first collected in 1816. The plant is listed as threatened, and almost none of it is left on Table Rock.
4,784 ft · The Georgia Blue Ridge
Brasstown Bald
Georgia's high point at 4,784 feet, a shrub-bald summit with a lookout tower and, on its north face, an old yellow birch forest Charles Wharton called the state's only cloud forest.
3,166 ft · The Georgia Blue Ridge
Yonah Mountain
A freestanding mountain of bare rock faces between Cleveland and Helen that the Army uses to test Ranger students. Geologists don't agree on what it is made of.
2,850 ft · Cohutta Mountains
Fort Mountain
A 2,850-foot mountain east of Chatsworth carrying a summit wall of piled stone some 855 to 930 feet long. Nobody has dated it, and nobody agrees who built it.
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5,342 ft · Nantahala Mountains
Wayah Bald
The most prominent of the Nantahala Balds in western Macon County, North Carolina, crowned by a stone fire lookout the Civilian Conservation Corps began in 1935.
6,030 ft · Great Balsam Mountains
Cold Mountain
A 6,030-foot summit in the Shining Rock Wilderness of Haywood County, North Carolina, and the home ground of the deserter behind Charles Frazier's novel.
6,214 ft · Great Balsam Mountains
Black Balsam Knob
One of the most photographed open summits near the Blue Ridge Parkway. Its grass and blueberry are usually put down to the spruce logging and the slash fires of 1925 and 1942 that opened the country around it.
Cumberland Plateau
Great Stone Door
A ten-foot-wide crack running from the rim of the Cumberland Plateau down into Savage Gulf in Grundy County, Tennessee, once a passageway between gorge and plateau.
3,324 ft · Cumberland Mountains
Frozen Head
A 3,324-foot summit above Petros in Morgan County, where a state prison mined coal at the mountain's foot and the hollows above carry some of the least disturbed forest in the Cumberland Mountains.