2/12/2023 0 Comments Pilot mountain“When you got halfway to the top, you didn’t want to look down, and you didn’t want to look up,” she says, laughing. She remembers exploring the mountain around the time it became a state park in 1968 and just before the steps - which led up the vertical, 200-foot-high knob that caps the 2,200 feet of elevation - were removed. “That peak over there,” says Kathy Hunter, pointing toward Big Pinnacle, which is now closed to the public, “they used to have wooden steps that went up the side of it.” Hunter grew up on a nearby tobacco farm and now works by the entrance to the park, at Pilot Knob Inn. While the land is now a state park, before that and for much longer, it was a local tourist attraction and often the site of a rollicking party scene. Over time, the quartzite broke off, forming cliffs and creating that exposed knob - known as Big Pinnacle - so iconic that Pilot Life Insurance Company used the image in its logo.Ī destination for generations of school field trips, hikes, and family picnics, the mountain gained worldwide fame - and a stream of new visitors - when Andy Griffith made it Mayberry’s notable landmark, too. They’re merely sand transformed by heat and pressure into sturdy quartzite. In fact, the peaks we see today were once at the bottom of a shallow sea. Rather, these distinctive elevations remained after the land around them eroded over time. Pilot Mountain - and the entire Sauratown range, including Hanging Rock - didn’t burst from the ground due to tectonic shifts or volcanic activity. Technically, it’s not even a mountain, or at least not what we typically think of as a mountain.
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