A high North Carolina overlook near the state line, around 5,200 feet — huge layered views and a fine place to watch the weather move across the ranges.
Pull off here at Big Junction — up around five thousand two hundred feet, one of the great high overlooks on the North Carolina side, and a spot where you can really read the mountains. Get out and look at how they stack: rank after rank of ridgelines, each one a slightly paler shade of blue than the one in front, marching back until they dissolve into the sky. Painters have a name for that — atmospheric perspective — and there's no better place on earth to see it than a Southern Appalachian overlook on a clear afternoon.
This is a wonderful place to just watch the sky work. Up this high you're often at eye level with the weather — you can watch a rain shower drag its gray skirt across a distant valley while you stand in full sun, or see the shadows of clouds slide across whole mountainsides like something alive. Hawks and ravens ride the updrafts along these ridges; if you see a big black bird tumbling and rolling in the wind for the sheer joy of it, that's a raven, and it's showing off.
Take a few minutes. There's no hurry up here, and no crowd to move you along — that's the gift of this road. Just you, a mile of air, and about a hundred million years of mountains laid out at your feet.
Photo: Dougtone · CC BY-SA 2.0
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