NCNorth Carolina Geography

Elisha Mitchell died proving this was the highest ground

Mount Mitchell reaches 6,684 feet in the Black Mountains of Yancey County, the highest summit anywhere in the United States east of the Mississippi River. It carries the name of the University of North Carolina professor who measured it in the 1830s and spent twenty years arguing that it beat Grandfather Mountain and the White Mountains of New Hampshire. In 1857, aged 63, he climbed back up to re-check his readings, slipped at a waterfall on the mountain's flank, and drowned. He is buried on the summit, and the waterfall carries his name as well.

North Carolina holds more land above 6,000 feet than any other state east of the Mississippi, most of it strung along the Black Mountain crest north of Mitchell where several more summits clear 6,500 feet. From that crest to the beach at Cape Hatteras the land loses all 6,684 feet in about 500 miles, a range no other Atlantic seaboard state comes close to matching.

Three provinces and the line where boats stopped

The state is divided into three belts running southwest to northeast. The Blue Ridge in the west is metamorphic rock, gneiss and schist crumpled during continental collisions hundreds of millions of years ago. The Piedmont in the middle is the worn-down root of an older mountain range, its crystalline bedrock rotted in place into deep red clay saprolite. The Coastal Plain in the east is loose sand, clay and marine sediment laid down when the ocean stood over it.

The seam between the last two is the fall line, where rivers step off hard rock onto soft sediment, break into rapids and stop being navigable. In North Carolina it runs through Roanoke Rapids, Rocky Mount, Smithfield and Fayetteville, and those towns exist because of it. Boats came upriver as far as the drop and no further, and the drop itself turned mill wheels.

Barrier islands that refuse to hold still

The Outer Banks stand as much as 30 miles off the mainland, farther out than any other barrier island chain in the country, with Pamlico Sound filling the gap behind them. Pamlico is the largest lagoon on the East Coast, and together with Albemarle Sound it makes up the second largest estuarine system in the United States after Chesapeake Bay.

The islands move. A hurricane in September 1846 opened both Hatteras Inlet and Oregon Inlet in a single night; neither appeared on any earlier chart. Hurricane Isabel cut a fresh channel straight through Hatteras Island in 2003, and the state had to fill it to reconnect the highway. In 1999 the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse was jacked onto rails and rolled 2,900 feet inland, because the ocean that had been 1,500 feet away when the tower was built in 1870 had closed to within about 120 feet of its base.

Cape Hatteras is also where the cold coastal current running south down the shelf collides with the warm Gulf Stream running north. The meeting piles sand into Diamond Shoals, which reach roughly twelve miles offshore in shifting bars, and the wrecks that earned the stretch its name, the Graveyard of the Atlantic, run into the thousands.

Rivers that leave through the back door

The Eastern Continental Divide follows the Blue Ridge crest, and crucially it does not sit on the Tennessee state line. West of the divide but still inside North Carolina, the French Broad, the Watauga, the Nolichucky, the Hiwassee and the Little Tennessee all rise and then flow northwest out of the state, joining the Tennessee River and eventually reaching the Gulf of Mexico by way of the Ohio and the Mississippi. Rain falling a few miles east of the same ridge goes to the Atlantic instead, through the Catawba, the Yadkin-Pee Dee, the Cape Fear or the Neuse.

The New River in Ashe and Alleghany counties does something stranger. It flows north into Virginia and West Virginia, and it is old enough to have been cutting its channel before the mountains it now passes through had finished rising.

A border that legally moved in 2017

Each of the state's three land boundaries was drawn on a different principle. The Tennessee line is a watershed boundary, tracing the crest of the Unaka and Great Smoky ranges rather than any surveyed line. The Virginia line is the 36 degree 30 minute parallel, the same latitude the Missouri Compromise would use a century later, first run eastward from the Great Dismal Swamp by William Byrd II's commission in 1728.

The South Carolina line is the messy one. Surveyors ran it in disconnected pieces between 1735 and 1815, the segments met at odd angles, and the original markers rotted or vanished. The two states re-ran the whole thing with modern survey equipment starting in the 1990s, and the corrected boundary took legal effect on 1 January 2017. Around nineteen properties changed states overnight. A convenience store near Lake Wylie ended up on the North Carolina side and lost the cheaper South Carolina fuel tax and fireworks sales that had been its business.

Cold on the summit, hurricanes on the beach

The state record high is 110 °F, set at Fayetteville on 21 August 1983. The record low is,34 °F, set on Mount Mitchell on 21 January 1985. The summit averages colder year-round than Boston and supports a red spruce and Fraser fir forest that is a leftover of the last ice age, a patch of Canadian habitat stranded on a mountaintop when the climate warmed around it.

At the other end, the Outer Banks stick out into the path of storms curving north up the Atlantic, and North Carolina has taken more hurricane landfalls than any state outside Florida and the Gulf Coast. The same exposure that wrecks ships also delivers wind: the Wright brothers picked the Outer Banks in 1900 after writing to the Weather Bureau for a place with reliable wind and soft sand.

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